transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:08] Welcome to Creepscast. I Hunt Down The Government's Mess Ups. Written by TallLemmen. I've been thinking about whether to do this for a long time, not because I'm worried about what happens to me. The office will not come from me because the office does not work that way. The most effective classification system ever invented is not a locked file cabinet or a server behind a firewall. It is the certainty that anything I say publicly will be dismissed as fiction. I could describe every job that I've ever worked in exact detail and post it on the internet and the result would be that a few thousand people would read it, and most of them would assume that it's made up. That is the security model. Public disbelief. It has never failed. For the past eight years, I have worked for a division of the federal government that doesn't have a public-facing name. I call it the office. On paper, it operates under the Department of the Interior. In practice, it answers to a small inter-agency committee that I have never met and communicate with only through my handler, a woman named Delia Marsh. My job, if it had a title, would be something like containment or recovery specialist. Before the office, I spent 12 years as a Wildlife Management Officer for the state of Wyoming. I tracked problem animals in the back country, wolves that killed livestock, mountain lions that wandered too close to subdivisions, bears that had lost their fear of humans and needed to be relocated or put down. And I was good at it. I was good at finding things in difficult terrain that did not want to be found. The office recruited me because they needed that skillset for targets that were not animals, or were not entirely animals, or were not animals anymore. I am going to tell you about three jobs, three incidents, three mistakes. The details are exact. The locations are real, though I have changed some names. The things that I saw are described the way that I saw them, without exaggeration. And these are not the worst jobs that I have worked. And they are not the strangest. And they are the ones that I think about the most. The ones that come back to me in the quiet moments. Here is how the work operates. I get a call from Delia. She gives me a location and a briefing, which is usually short because the office often doesn't know exactly what it is sending me into. I drive to the location. I assess the situation. I contain whatever needs containing, and then I report back. The office will send a clean up crew if one is needed and then I leave. The incident is filed into a system that I do not have access to and life moves on. I live alone in a rented house outside of Casper, Wyoming. No wife, no kids, and no close friends. The work doesn't allow for it. Not because the office forbids relationships. Because once you have seen what I have seen, you can't sit across a dinner table from somebody that you care about and pretend that the world makes sense. You can't send a woman a good morning text and then drive to a valley in Utah where the cattle have stopped moving and something that is not cattle is standing among them wearing their shape. The two realities do not fit inside the same life. I'm telling you all this because I think people deserve to know, even if knowing will not change anything. Even if the only thing it changes is the way you look at a stretch of empty highway, or a fenced off parcel of federal land, or a road that has been closed for repairs that never seemed to end. Here are my stories. A late September, three years ago, Antilia called me on a Tuesday morning. She said that a state highway maintenance crew in eastern Montana had found something in a drainage ditch and one of the workers had to be hospitalized. She didn't have details on what the worker saw. She gave me coordinates and told me to go take a look. I drove out the next day. Eastern Montana is a place that most Americans have never seen and cannot picture. It is not the Montana on the tourist brochures, the mountains and the rivers and the fly fishing. Eastern Montana is grassland. It is enormous and flat and dry and goes on forever. The sky is so big out there that it feels like the land is just a narrow strip between two infinite blue walls. You can drive for an hour and see nothing but grass and fence posts, and the occasional pronghorn standing on a ridge watching you pass. The site was on a two-lane state highway between two small towns called Seldon and Garfield Crossing. I found it easily, a concrete ditch running under the road, used for drainage on the north side to a dry creek bed on the south. Standard highway drainage infrastructure. It was about four feet in diameter and roughly 60 feet long. The north opening was partially clogged with tumbleweeds and dried silt. The south opening emptied into a shallow creek bed choked with dead grass. I had a flashlight, a 50-foot rope and a side arm. I was alone. And the office does not send teams for assessment. Teams come after once I tell them what they're dealing with. I went in from the north side. The pipe was tight. Four feet is big enough to crouch walk, but not big enough to stand or move quickly. The floor was silty and damp. The kind of accumulated sediment you would find in any culvert that has been sitting under a highway for decades. The culvert was sixty feet long. I should have been able to see daylight from the south opening within a few seconds of entering. I could not. The pipe stretched ahead of me and the flashlight beam dissolved into darkness and there was no circle of daylight at the far end. I kept walking. I counted my steps. At sixty steps, which should have put me well past the south opening and out on the other side, the pipe was still going. The walls were all the same. The silt on the floor hadn't changed, but the distance was all wrong. I had been walking for what felt like three minutes inside a pipe that should have taken maybe thirty seconds to cross. I stopped, I turned my flashlight behind me. The north opening was still there, a small circle of gray daylight, but it was much further away than it should have been. I had entered a sixty foot culvert and I had walked at least a hundred and fifty feet and I was still inside of it. Now I want to be clear about something. I am not describing a magic trick. I am not describing a hallway that stretches or a room that changes size. This culvert was concrete. It was real. It was physically longer on the inside than it was on the outside. Whatever was injected into the ground beneath that highway in the 1960s had done something to the space itself, or it had grown the culvert outward from the inside the way that a vine grows through a crack in a wall, extending it, adding to it, making more of it. I don't know the mechanism. I know what I measured with my own feet. I turned back around and kept going. The air changed. It became warmer and wetter and it picked up a smell that I can only describe as organic. Not rot, not decay, but something alive. Like the inside of a large animal. Like putting your face close to the belly of a horse and breathing in. The concrete walls were no longer clean. They were coated in something dark and slick that caught the light from my flashlight and gave it back in a dull sheen. I did not touch it. The silt on the floor had been replaced by a substance that was softer, that compressed under my boots and sprang slowly back. It had the texture of wet muscle. And then my flashlight found what the highway worker found. In the center roughly 200 feet from the entrance of the 60-foot pipe, there was a mass of biological material. I'm choosing my words carefully here. It was tissue and it was alive. It was growing out of the walls and the floor and the ceiling, fused with the concrete the way that a tree root fuses with a sidewalk over decades. It was dark red and vascular. I could see veins running through it, thick ones, pulsing with a slow rhythm that I could feel through my boots. It was warm. The heat radiating from it was noticeable from 10 feet away, and it filled most of the pipe, leaving only a narrow gap at the top between the mass and the ceiling that I could have squeezed through if I had wanted to. I did not want to. It was organized, but not in any way that I recognized. Not like an organ or a body or any anatomy that I had seen in an animal. It was structured, but the structure was its own. It had a heartbeat, slow and heavy and steady. The mass was maybe 15 feet long and it filled the culvert from wall to wall, and it had been growing for a very long time. Decades, I would guess, based on how thoroughly it had bonded with the concrete. It was not sitting in the culvert. It was a part of it. The pipe had become its body. I backed out, slowly, watching it the entire time. Though it didn't move and it showed no sign of awareness. It was not an animal. It was not reacting to my presence. It was just growing, living and growing and pulsing in the dark the way that it had been doing since whatever the government put in the ground in the 1960s had found its way into this pipe. I called Delia from my truck. I asked her what was at this location before the highway. She checked and told me the highway was built in 1974 on a route that crossed a parcel of land leased by the Department of Defense from 1961 to 1969. The lease was for soil testing. I asked what kind. She said the records were sealed but the land was used for underground injection trials. The substance injected was classified. The project was terminated in 1969. The land returned to the state. The highway was built over it five years later. I told Delia that whatever they had injected was still alive and it was growing. It had colonized the culvert and almost certainly the surrounding soil. I recommended excavation and containment. She said that she would send in a team. I drove back to Casper. Two months later, I checked in with Delia. The team had excavated the culvert and the surrounding area to a depth of 20 feet. The biological mass extended through the soil in a network that covered roughly three acres. All of it was alive. All of it growing at a measurable rate. They removed what they could and sealed the rest under a concrete cap. The highway was reopened with no public explanation for the ten-day closure. The local paper reported it as an emergency road repairer. The part that stays with me is not the mass and the culvert. It's the fact that it grew for over 50 years under that highway without anybody knowing. 50 years. Every car and truck that drove over that stretch of road between Seldon and Garfield Crossing was driving over something alive. Something with a beating heart. Something that was fused into the concrete and spreading slowly outward through the Montana soil for half a century. And if a highway worker hadn't crawled into a drainage pipe to clear some tumbleweeds, nobody would have ever known. I think about that sometimes. How many culverts are there in this country? How many miles a highway are built over old government land? How many underground spaces where something might be growing right now, in the dark where nobody's looking? I try not to think about it too much. The hardest part of this work is not the danger, it isn't the isolation, it's the knowledge. Once you know that the government buried something alive under a highway in Montana in 1969, you can't unlearn that, you carry it. Every highway you drive on, every stretch of fenced off federal land you see from a car window, you wonder, what's down there, what's been done here, what was left behind? Here's the second story. Mid-July, two years ago, Delia called and told me that a rancher in west central Utah had reported a problem with his cattle. The rancher's name was Boyd Sutter. He ran about 80 head of beef cattle on a grazing lease in a broad dry valley between two mountain ranges. The valley was accessible only by a single unpaved road. The nearest town was Calloway, population may be 200, a former mining settlement that existed mostly as a waypoint for ranchers. The valley was public land in theory, but so remote that nobody went there except the occasional hunter. Boyd moved his cattle into the valley every spring and brought them out in early fall. He had been doing it for 20 years. This July when he drove in to check the herd, the cattle were wrong. They were clustered in the center of the valley, standing in a tight-knit group, motionless and all facing inward. They would not respond to his truck horn. They wouldn't respond to his voice. He approached on foot and they did not flee. Heck, they didn't react at all. He said they were standing so still that from a distance, they looked like statues. He said their eyes were open, but he couldn't tell if they were seeing anything. And he said the herd seemed larger than when he had left it. The Bureau of Land Management sent an officer to investigate. The officer drove into the valley, looked at the herd through binoculars from about a quarter-mile away, drove back out, and filed a report through channels that eventually reached the office. I don't know exactly what the officer saw through those binoculars, but I do know that he took early retirement two weeks later and moved to the Gulf Coast of Florida. The report did not include photographs. I drove to the valley. It took most of a day on bad roads. The landscape out there is sage and bunch grass and dry pale dirt under a sky that is so blue, it almost looks like it has been painted. The mountains on either side of the valley are low and dry. No trees except a few junipers on the ridge. Visibility is perfect, which is both a comfort and a concern, because I could see the herd from miles away. They were in the center of the valley, a dark mass on the valley floor, motionless. I stopped my truck about a half mile out and I lifted my binoculars. I counted. There were more than 80. I reached 112 before the bodies at the center of the cluster became too tightly packed to distinguish individually. A boyd runs 80 ahead, and there were at least 30 extra animals in that herd, possibly more. I drove closer about a quarter mile. The cattle were standing in concentric rings, all facing inward toward the center of the formation. Their bodies were pressed close, shoulder to shoulder, flank to flank. I could not see them breathing. I got out of my truck. I walked toward the herd. The valley was perfectly still. No wind, no birds, no insects. The air was hot and still, and the only sound was my boots on the dry ground and the faint creak of my gear. The cattle did not react to my approach. I got within a hundred yards and I stopped. Something was wrong with them beyond the stillness. It took me a moment to identify it. The cattle in the outer ring looked normal, like standard range cattle. Red and black and brindled hides. Heavy bodies. The typical proportions you see in any beef herd in the western states. But the cattle further in, the ones in the second and third rings, they were different. Their proportions were off. Their legs were slightly too long. The bodies were a little too narrow. Heads the right shape, but set too far forward on the neck. Angled down, as if they were staring at the ground instead of looking ahead. The difference was subtle in the second ring. By the third ring, though, it was obvious. In the innermost cattle, the ones that I could barely see through the press of bodies. They didn't look entirely like cattle anymore. The shapes of them were close, and the size seemed to be right. But the proportions were wrong in a way that my brain registered as deeply and fundamentally incorrect. Like a drawing of a cow made by something that had seen a cow from a distance but had never stood right next to one. I understood. The extra animals were not Boyd's cattle. They were something else. They had joined the herd and grown within it, or been produced by whatever was happening in that valley. And they were shaped like cattle because cattle was what surrounded them. They were mimicking the form, filling in and blending. And the real cattle were frozen in their rings, standing motionless and facing inward, held in place by whatever was at the center of the formation. The thing they were all looking at. The thing I could not see because the press of bodies was too tight, and I would have to walk into the herd to reach it. I wasn't going to walk into that herd. I went back to my truck and I called Julia. I told her that the herd seemed to be compromised. I told her that there were organisms in the valley that were assuming the physical characteristics of the cattle and integrating into the formation. I told her the real cattle appeared to be immobilized but alive. I recommended the entire herd be destroyed and that the valley be permanently closed. Julia asked me what was at the center, the thing that they were all facing. I said that I didn't get close enough to see. She asked if I wanted to go back with the team and I said no. I said that whatever was in there had put over a hundred large animals into a state of total paralysis and I wasn't really interested in finding out what it did when a human walked into the middle of it. And Delia said that she would send a team. And the team went in two weeks later, six people including armed personnel and a veterinary specialist. The team leader radioed a report at 11 in the morning. He said they were within 50 yards of the outer ring. He said that the cattle were still motionless. He said they were going to try to push through the formation to reach the center. That was the last communication from the team. A recovery unit went in the following day. The herd was still there. The cattle had not moved. The team's vehicles were parked where they had left them. Their equipment was found on the ground. Their radios were in the dirt. There was no sign of the six people who had walked toward the herd the day before. No bodies, no clothing, no drag marks. Nothing. They were simply gone. The office quarantined the valley. They closed down the road. Fenced the access points with government signage. And they filed paperwork as a grazing lease revocation due to persistent drought conditions. Boyd Sutter was compensated for the loss of his herd at Market Raid and signed a non-disclosure agreement. He moved to Price and took a job at a feed store. He does not talk about the valley. And the valley is still closed. As of the last satellite imagery that I've seen, the herd is still there. Still standing there in the center of it and still motionless, facing inward. The formation hasn't changed in two years. And they're still standing exactly where they were when I first saw them, as if they're waiting. For what? I don't know. Nobody knows. The office has decided not to find out. Delia told me later that the valley was used in the late 1970s for a series of atmospheric dispersal tests conducted by a joint military-civilian research program. A substance had been released over the valley, multiple dispersals over a period of about three years. The tests concluded in 1981, and the site was listed as fully remediated. Whatever was sprayed into the air settled into the soil and the water table in the grass, and the cattle ate the grass and drank the water for 20 years and nothing happened. But then one summer, something woke up. I think about Boyd sometimes. The man did nothing wrong, but he had to drive away and lose everything and sign a paper that said that he would never speak about it. The mistake was made in a government office in 1977, and the cost was paid by a rancher in Utah almost 50 years later. And nobody will be held accountable because nobody outside the office even knows that it happened. That's how it works. That's how it always works. My third story is the one that cost me the most. In March of last year, Delia's briefing was longer than usual, which is never a good sign. When Delia talks for more than two minutes, it means the situation has layers to it. She told me the office had been monitoring a property in Harney County, Oregon for almost two years. Harney County is in the southeastern corner of the state, Mets High Desert, a sagebrush, a stop. It is one of the largest and least populated counties in the lower 48. The landscape is vast and flat and empty, a way that makes eastern Montana look crowded. You can drive for an hour on a county road and not see another vehicle. The nearest town of any size is Burns, a population about 3,000. The property in question belonged to a man named Chet Linden. Chet was in his mid-50s, a former Bureau Land Management employee. He had worked as a wildland firefighter in his younger years and later as a facilities manager for a remote research station that was decommissioned in 2004. When the station shut down, Chet stayed in the area. He bought a small ranch property about 40 minutes south of Burns on a county road that sees maybe 10 vehicles a day. He lived there with his wife Nora and their two boys. Delia told me that Chet had contacted the office in Burns about 18 months earlier, claiming that something was wrong with his land. He said that the ground behind his house was warm, not hot, but warm, noticeably warmer than the surrounding soil. He said it had started in a small area maybe 10 feet across near the back fence line. The warm area had been growing. The soil there was softer than the ground around it, and it had a faint vibration, like standing on top of a machine running at low speed somewhere below. The Bureau of Land Management sent out a field officer. The officer confirmed the warm soil and the vibration and found a report. Somebody at a federal agency cross-referenced the location with old project records and found that Chet's property, set on the boundary of a site used from 1967 to 1972 for deep wall injection experiments conducted by the Department of Energy. The injections were performed at a depth of roughly 800 feet, multiple wells. The project ran for five years. The wells were kept and sealed when it had ended. And Delia told me the warm area had continued to expand and now covered most of the acreage behind the house, about six acres. The vibration was stronger. Chet's well water had changed. It was warmer than it used to be, and it had a taste that he described as metallic and sweet. His wife Nora was having persistent headaches, and the younger boy who was 12 had started sleepwalking. Now not ordinary sleepwalking. The boy would get out of bed in the middle of night, walk out of the house, and stand barefoot in the warm area behind the back vents, in the cold and the dark perfectly still. And when Chet brought him inside, the boy wouldn't remember any of it. Adelia said the monitoring data suggested the subsurface activity was intensifying. She did not define what that meant. She sent me to assess whether the family needed to be relocated and whether the site needed active containment. I drove to the property. Southeastern Oregon is a landscape that does things to your sense of scale. The emptiness is so vast that distance loses meaning. You drive for an hour and the mountains on the horizon do not seem any closer. The land is flat sage in every direction, gray, green, and pale. With the occasional rimrock formation or dry lake bed breaking up the monotony, it's a place that feels older than most places. Like the earth here hasn't been interrupted by anything in a very long time. The Linden property was a modest ranch house with a metal barn and a couple of outbuildings and about 20 acres. The driveway was a quarter mile of gravel. When I pulled in, Chet was on the front porch. He had been expecting me. Adelia had called ahead. Chet Linden was the kind of man you find in places like Harney County. Big, weathered hands that looked like they had been carved from hardwood. He did not waste words. He shook my hand and said, that you're from the government. And I said yes. And he said, let me show you the back. And that was the end of the small talk. He walked me around the house and through the back gate and into the acreage behind the property. I saw it immediately. I mean, the warm area was obvious. The sage that grew inside its boundary was taller and greener than the sage outside, which was wrong for March in the high desert when everything should be brown and dormant. Inside the warm area, the sage was shoulder height and bright green, lush in a way that looked almost tropical against the gray steppe around it. The boundary was sharp. You could stand with one foot in brown, dormant sage, and the other foot in green, living sage. And the difference was so stark that it looked like somebody had drawn a line on the ground. I crouched at the edge and put my hand on the soil. Warm. Not uncomfortable, maybe 85 degrees. In March, when the ambient soil temperature should have been in the thirties, and the vibration, it was exactly as Chet described. A low, steady pulse. Rhythmic. Rising up through the ground and into my palm. It felt organic. It felt like putting your hand on the chest of something that was breathing. I walked the perimeter of the warm area. It was close to seven acres. Larger than what was originally reported. Which meant that it had grown since the last assessment. It extended from behind the house to the property line and beyond. Into the open land south of the fence. I crouched again at a different point and pressed my hand flat against the soil and I held it there for a long time. The vibration was steady and even, like a heartbeat. And underneath it, deeper, slower, I could feel something else. Movement. Not the vibration, something separate. Something large, turning over slowly far below the surface. The way you might feel a passing whale under a small boat. A sense of enormous mass and motion. Deep in the earth. Moving in a way that was deliberate and slow. I talked to Chet. He stood with his arms folded and his jaws set, and he told me what had been happening. The warm area grew about a foot a week in every direction. The vibration was getting stronger month by month. His well water was warmer every time that he tested it. Norah's headaches were constant now until she had started getting nosebleeds. Bad ones, the kinds where you fill a towel and it does not stop for 20 minutes. And the boy, the 12-year-old, the sleepwalking was almost nightly now. Chet had installed a lock on the boy's bedroom door, the kind that latched from the outside. He locked his own son in his room every night so that the boy could not walk out to the warm in the dark. Chet told me this with his jaw tight and his voice flat, and I could see what it was costing him to say it out loud. He knew how it sounded, a father locking his child's door from the outside. He knew that in any context that would be an unforgivable thing, anything normal. But this was not a normal context. The alternative was finding his son standing barefoot in a field of warm soil at three in the morning, eyes open and unseen, pulled there by something neither of them could explain. I told Chet the truth, there is much of it as I had. I told him about the Department of Energy injecting something into deep wells on this site over 50 years ago. I told him that the wells were sealed, but whatever was injected appeared to be active, and it was generating heat. It was expanding. It was affecting the water table and possibly the people living above it. And Chet absorbed it. I expected anger. I've been yelled at before by people who discovered that their land, their water, their lives had been contaminated by something the government did before they were born. I've stood in kitchens and living rooms and fields while people raged at me, as if I were the one who had signed the orders. I understand the anger. I even think that it's justified. But Chet did not get angry. He just got tired. Or rather, he let me see the tiredness that had been there all along. The exhaustion of a man who had known for months that something was profoundly wrong with his home and his family, and to have been waiting for somebody to come and confirm it. He just nodded. He looked at the green sage behind his house and he nodded once and he asked me what he should do. I told him that his family needed to leave immediately. He said that he would talk to Nora and he said it would take a few days. I spent the night at a hotel in Burns. The next morning, I drove back to the Linden property. When I turned onto the county road, I could see the green sage from almost a mile away. It was larger, significantly larger. Overnight, it had expanded by dozens of feet in every direction. It had pushed past the back fence and was now within 20 feet of the house. The sage in the newly warm area was not just green, but it was tall, well above shoulder height, growing months or years in a single night. The vibration was strong enough that I could feel it in the driveway, through the gravel and these soles of my boots. The whole property felt like it was humane. Jet was in the kitchen. Nora was at the table. She looked bad, pale, thin, dark rings under her eyes. She was holding a folded cloth to her nose, and the cloth was spotted with blood. She did not look up when I came in. She looked like a woman who had juiced up all her energy months ago, and was running on something deeper and less renewable than energy. Something like obligation. Like she was staying upright because her children needed her to be upright, and for no other reason. Chet told me the boy had gone out again last night. The lock was engaged on his bedroom door, but the boy went out through his window. Chet found him again at three in the morning, standing barefoot in the warm area, fifty feet from the house, the same as before. He wasn't responsive when he tried to call his name, or when he put his hand on his shoulder. He was just standing there in the dark and the cold, wearing his pajamas with his bare feet on soil that was eighty-five degrees, and the rest of him exposed to air that was below freezing. Chet picked him up and carried him inside. The boy did not resist and did not wake up. And his feet, which had been standing on the warm ground, were not warm. They were ice cold. As if the heat in the soil was not radiating up into the boy's body, but pulling something downward out of it. I told Chet the family was leaving today. Not in a few days, not after they had time to arrange things, but today, right now. Chet looked at Nora, and Nora looked down at the table. And then she stood up and walked to the bedroom and started putting clothes in a bag. And the older boy, who was 14, started carrying boxes to the truck without being asked. He hadn't said a word the entire time that I was there. He was old enough to understand what was happening and young enough that he could not do anything about it. And the expression on his face was one that I had seen before in this work. The expression of someone whose world has become something that they didn't agree to. While they packed, I walked to the edge of the warm area. It was closer to the house than it had been when I had arrived 30 minutes earlier. I could see it advancing. Not quickly, but visibly. The boundary between the dead brown sage and the impossible green sage was creeping toward the foundation at a pace of about a foot every few minutes. Slow by human standards, fast by any standard that involves the grounded self moving. I crouched at the edge. I put my hand flat on the soil. The vibration was intense, and I could feel it in my wrist, in my elbow, and in my teeth. And underneath the vibration, that deep, slow movement. The thing down there. The thing that had been growing and rising ever since they had injected it in 1967. It was moving closer to the surface. Substantially closer than it had been the day before. Yesterday, the movement had felt deep. Like a subway train far below a city street. Today it felt like it was just under the floor of a building. Close and getting closer. And then it changed direction. I was kneeling with my palm on the ground and I felt it shift. The movement had been lateral. Expanding out where it is spreading through the soil toward the edges of the warm area. But now it was rising slowly and steadily toward the surface. Toward my hand. I could feel it coming the way you feel the floor vibrate when a heavy truck is approaching. The vibration intensified. The soil under my hand got warmer. And something down there, something enormous and alive and patient was moving up. I pulled my hand away. I stood up. I walked to the house and told Chet that they were leaving now. Not in 20 minutes, not after one more load. They had to get out of here right now. Get in the truck and drive. The family immediately headed to their vehicle. Chet got behind the wheel, Noor in the passenger seat and both boys in the back. I followed behind them in my truck. We drove out of the gravel driveway and onto the county road, and I watched the property shrink in my mirror. The house looked the same. The barn looked the same. But the sage being the house was taller than it had been when we left, and the green area was wider and it was still growing. The office sent a containment team the following week. I was not part of it, and Delia briefed me afterward. The team arrived and found that the warm area had made it to the house. The foundation was compromised. The house was sinking. Not collapsing, but sinking and being drawn downward. The soil beneath the foundation had become soft and warm and yielding, and the house was settling into it slowly, like a heavy object is settling into wet sand. The porch was six inches lower than it should have been. The door frames were wracked. The concrete slab had cracked in three places. The team assessed and withdrew. The office arranged for the property to be condemned through the county building department, citing foundation failure. The county road past the property was closed for what was described as a bridge inspection. The Linden family was relocated to Boise under a federal assistance program that does not appear in any public record. I called Chet about a month later. He said the family was getting by. They had an apartment in Boise. Nora's headache stopped within a week of leaving, and her nosebleed stopped within a few days after that. The older boy had started at a new school and was handling it. He was a steady kid. He would be all right. The younger boy was still sleepwalking. And not every night, not as frequently as before, but still pretty often. And it had changed. He was no longer walking outside. He was walking to the front door of the apartment. Chet would find him in the middle of the night, standing at the door with his hand on the knob, eyes open, expressionless, facing south toward Harney County. Every time it was the same. He wasn't trying to open the door, just standing there with his hand on the knob, like he was waiting for permission, or waiting for something to tell him that it was time. Chet said again, the boy never remembered any of it in the morning. I talked to Delia after that call. She told me that the warm area on the Linden property had expanded to over 40 acres. The house had sunk almost two feet into the ground and the barn was leaning at a visible angle. The well had collapsed and the casing pulled down into the softening earth, and satellite imagery showed that the warm area was not circular. It was not expanding evenly in all directions. It was spreading along the paths of the underground wells. Following the injection routes from the 1960s, reaching outward through the desert like fingers of following the veins in the rock, reaching toward the neighboring properties, toward the road, and patiently toward burns. Now I know I promised only three stories, but going through all these old jobs stirred up some memories that I must have forgotten. So, let's do one more. Why not? This is the one job that most closely resembled the work that I used to do for the state of Wyoming, and that made it worse in a way that I did not anticipate. Tracking a problem animal through back country is something that my body knows how to do. My legs know the pace. My eyes know what to look for. Broken branches, disturbed soil, hair caught on bark. One Delia called me in in early November about 18 months ago and told me that I was going to the Bitterroot Mountains in central Idaho to track something. Part of me felt almost relieved. This was work that I understood. I was wrong about that though. I understood the method. I did not understand what I was tracking. The briefing was short even by Delia's standards. She told me that the Forest Service had received a cluster of reports from elk hunters in the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness. Three separate hunting parties over a span of about two weeks had reported encountering an animal that they could not identify. The descriptions were inconsistent in the specifics but consistent in the broad strokes. Large, bipedal, or at least capable of bipedal movement. Dark in color, fast. Each party encountered it at a different location, but all three were in the same drainage. A long, narrow valley following a tributary of the Selway River about 30 miles from the nearest road. One hunter described it as a bear walking upright, except the proportions were wrong. The arms were too long. The head was too small. The gait was smooth and not the shuffling, unbalanced walk of a bear on its hind legs. But a fluid and purposeful stride, like something built to walk that way. The second group saw it at dusk from across the meadow. They said that it was standing at the treeline watching their camp, and they estimated it at seven feet tall. One of the hunters looked at it through his rifle scope and put the gun down and told the others that they were leaving. He would not say what he saw through the scope. The group packed out that night, hiking four hours in the dark to reach their vehicles. The third party did not see it. They heard it, moving through the timber above their camp in the middle of the night. Heavy footfalls, branches breaking. They said that it circled their camp twice. They said it made a sound they described as breathing but too loud, like the exhale of something with lungs larger than any animal they knew of. Deep and resonant in clothes. One of the hunters discharged his rifle into the trees. The sound stopped. In the morning, they found tracks in the soft ground above the camp. The tracks were not consistent with any known species. They were roughly 18 inches long and showed five digits like a hand, but compressed and elongated. As if something that normally walked on four limbs had been walking on two, and its front feet had been bearing weight that they were not designed for. The forest service does not have a protocol for unidentified bipedal animals. They filed the reports and somebody at the regional office flagged them, and the flag found its way through the interagency channels that led to Delia. She told me to go in and track it, find it if I could, identify it, determine if it was a threat, determine if it was one of ours. That last part is the part that matters, determine if it was one of ours. Because the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness sits adjacent to a stretch of national forest that was used by the Department of Defense in the early 70s for a program that Delia described only as a biological enrichment study. She said the program involved the release of modified organisms into a controlled forest environment to observe adaptation and survival rates. The organisms were classified. The study ran for three years and was terminated in 1974. The containment protocols at the conclusion of the study called for the recovery and destruction of all released organisms. She said the recovery was listed as complete. She said every organism was accounted for on the project's final inventory. I asked Delia how confident the office was in that inventory. She said not confident enough or she would not be sending me. I drove to Idaho. I spent a day in the town of Darby, Montana just across the border organizing my gear, and then I hiked into the wilderness. I want to describe the Bitterroot because the landscape matters. This is not a groomed national park with trails and signage. The Selway Bitterroot is one of the largest wilderness areas in the lower 48. It is steep, dense, old-growth forest, cut by deep drainages and narrow ridge lines. The canopy in the valley bottoms is so thick that even at midday, the light on the forest floor is dim and green and filtered. The undergrowth is heavy. Visibility is often less than 50 yards. The terrain is the kind of country where a bull owl can stand a hundred feet from you and you will not see it until it moves. It is excellent country for something that does not want to be found. I hiked to where the sightings occurred. It took a day and a half. I set up a base camp on a flat bench above the creek and I started working. I'm a good tracker. I'll say that without modesty because it's relevant. I spent 12 years tracking predators through the Wyoming backcountry, and I can read ground signs and conditions that would frustrate most people. Compressed grass overturned pebbles. The faint disturbance in a bed of pine needles were something heavy passed through hours ago. I am patient, I am thorough, and I know what I'm doing. I found something on the first day. A game trail on the north side of the drainage that had been used by something heavy. The tracks were faint but present. Pressed into a patch of damp soil where the trail crossed a seep. Five digits, eighteen inches roughly. Deeper at the toe than the heel which indicated a forward leaning posture. By pedal, walking with purpose, not wandering. The stride length was about four feet, which for a seven foot animal would indicate a relaxed walking pace. Not hurrying, not fleeing, just moving through its territory. I followed the tracks up the drainage for about two miles. They stayed on the game trail, then they left it. Cutting uphill through heavy timber toward the ridge line. The ground was drier on the slope and the tracks faded. I lost them halfway up. I spent two more days working the drainage. I found tracks and three other locations. I found a place where something had bedded down in a thicket of young firs. The branches pushed aside and the ground compressed in an oval of about six feet long. I found droppings once in a rocky wash. I will not describe it in detail except to say that it was large, and it didn't match any species that I knew, and it contained material that I could not identify. Not bones or vegetation. Something fibrous and dark that I didn't recognize. On the fourth night, I heard it. I was in my tent at about two in the morning. The forest was quiet the way that deep wilderness is quiet at night, which is not truly quiet at all. Owls, creek water, the occasional branch falling. But underneath those sounds, there's a baseline, a hum of living things, insects and small mammals in the general ambient noise of an ecosystem at rest. That baseline dropped out. The way it does when a large predator enters the area, everything small goes silent. Every bird it tucks its head. The forest holds its breath. I lay in my sleeping bag and I listened. I could hear something moving through the timber uphill from my camp, heavy and slow. It was walking through the trees about a hundred yards above me, moving laterally across the slope. I could hear branches deflecting, not breaking, but deflecting, which told me the animal was aware of its body and space and it was moving carefully. A bear crashes through the brush. A deer pushes through it. Whatever it was, it was treading through the timber the way that a person treads through a crowd, aware and intentional. It stopped, directly above my camp. A hundred yards uphill in the dark timber, I could not see anything. The canopy blocked the moonlight and the trees were black columns fading into deeper black. But I could feel it. The way you feel someone watching you from across the realm. An attention, a focus. It was standing in the dark and it was looking down at my camp and it knew that I was there. And then the breathing. The hunters were right. It was too loud, too deep. The exhale of something with a chest cavity larger than a horse, pushing air through a throat that resonated like a pipe organ. I could feel it in my sternum. A deep, a slow, rhythmic respiration that carried through the night air with a clarity that told me the animal was facing me. Facing downhill, facing my tent, breathing and watching. It lasted about ten minutes and then it moved on. The footfalls resumed heavy and slow, continuing across the slope and away to the east. The baseline sounds of the forest did not return for almost an hour. I lay in my tent and thought about what I had heard. I thought about twelve years of tracking wolves and mountain lions and black bears. I thought about the sounds that they make in the dark. I've heard all of them. I've been close to all of them. I had a mountain lion scream thirty yards from my tent and my hands didn't even shake. But now, my hands were shaking. Because what I heard wasn't an animal. It wasn't behaving like an animal. An animal that stumbles across the camp at two in the morning either investigates it or avoids it. It approaches or it leaves. It doesn't stop at a hillside a hundred yards away and stand there and breathe and watch for ten minutes. That is not predator behavior. And that is not prey behavior. That's observation, assessment. That is something with a mind looking at a situation and deciding what to do about it. I packed out the next morning. I hiked the day and a half back to my vehicle, and I drove to Darby and called Delia from my motel room. I told her what I had found, what I had experienced. I told her that whatever was in the bitter root drainage was large and bipedal intelligent, and it was not in any wildlife database in the country. I told her it was one of ours. Delia was quiet for a while, and then she asked me to describe the droppings again. I did and she asked about the fibrous material. I described as best I could. She asked if it was possible that it was synthetic. I said that I didn't know. She was quiet again. And then she told me something that made me sit down on the edge of the motel bed and stare at the wall. She said the biological enrichment study in the 70s involved the release of seven organisms. They were engineered from a primate base. She did not say what they were engineered to do. She said that the project ran for three years, and at the conclusion, the recovery team went in and collected six organisms. The other one was listed in the final report as uncovered and presumed dead. That forest was dense, the terrain extreme. The project director signed off on the loss. One organism out of seven was an acceptable attrition rate. That was about 50 years ago. Whatever it was that they left, it stayed and it adapted and it grew. For 50 years, it lived in one of the most remote wilderness areas in the country, and it was never found because nobody was looking and because it was smart enough not to be seen. I asked Delia what the office had planned to do. She said that the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness covered over a million acres, and that organism had demonstrated the ability to avoid detection for half a century, and that the office didn't currently have the resources or the mandate to conduct a recovery operation in that terrain. I asked her what that meant in plain language, and she said it meant that they were going to leave it alone. Delia told me later that the hunter, a man from Boise who had been hunting oaks in the Bitterroot for 20 years, the one that had seen the anomaly through his scope, sold all of his rifles within a month of the encounter. He quit hunting entirely. He wouldn't tell his wife why. He wouldn't tell anybody why. He simply stopped going into the woods and he never went back. I understand that. I didn't see it and I understand that. Because I heard it breathing and what I heard was not an animal. What I heard was something that was built to be more than an animal and that had 50 years alone in the wilderness to become whatever it was going to become. And that I didn't want to see what that is. Nobody does, that's why it's still out there. That's all I got for now. If you want to hear more of what I've been through, just let me know. Stay safe out there everyone. Don't always trust what you're being told. This episode is sponsored by Betterhelp. You ever notice how financial stress doesn't just stay about money? It kind of bleeds into everything. Your mood, your sleep, your relationships. I've definitely had moments where I felt completely overwhelmed, just trying to figure things out. Like no matter what I did, I was always a step behind. And I think a lot of people feel that way. The thing is, struggling with money doesn't mean that you failed. Sometimes, it just means you're dealing with a lot and you haven't had the right support yet. That's where therapy can actually help. Not by giving you financial advice, but by helping you manage the stress and anxiety that could come with it. It can help you understand your relationship with money, build healthier habits mentally, and just feel a little less alone with it. Betterhelp makes it easier to get started. They'll match you with a licensed therapist based on a short questionnaire, and if it's not a right fit, you can switch anytime. With over 30,000 therapists and millions of people using it, it's a way to connect with someone who can help you work through what's weighing on you. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/mr.creeps. That's better. help.com/mr.creeps. My Village Has A Rule, Never Go On The Swamp After Sunset. Written By BeeVampire. People in the village have avoided that vast stretch of mangrove forest near the river for decades. I remember my father warning me never to go deeper into the forest, beyond where sunlight could barely filter through the thick canopy. I wasn't the only one. Every kid in our coastal village had heard the story countless times. An evil spirit lurking somewhere in its dark, drenched corridors of trees, waiting for a chance to lunge at anybody foolish enough to wander too close. The real danger is probably much simpler and less mythical than that to most people these days, but I'm not writing this to debunk anything or to prove anything. I am old, too old. I can already feel my mind coming apart at the seams, my body deteriorating with each passing day. I am writing this as a warning to whomever it may concern. Never dismiss the remnants of old superstition still lingering in this modern world. They exist for a reason. Some may have first formed as a deterrent against the dangers of nature, passed from generation to generation as a way of making sense of the unknown. But there are places in this world where logic does not apply. The laws of reality bend and break, toyed with on a whim by forces that defy explanation. The mangrove forest near my village might be one of those places. I was only 22 when I first set foot in its treacherous, waterlogged terrain. The last time that I tried beneath its damp, suffocating canopy a few decades ago, a boy had gone missing. It was a brutally hot day under the July sun. I was standing beside my old wooden boat, minding my own business as usual, trying to untangle a stubborn pile of fishing net. The tide had gone out hours earlier, leaving the boat half buried in mud and sand. Out in the distance, the great waves of the ocean rolled endlessly toward the shore. From where I stood, they looked like long rows of dark beasts rising and collapsing over and over again. Their white crest flashed under the harsh sunlight. The air smelled strongly of salt. And then I noticed Nerina standing behind me, and I swear she hadn't been there a moment earlier. A Raya, she gasped, collapsing at my feet before I could react. Her body shook uncontrollably as she tried to steady herself. The hem of her light blue dress was soaked through, heavy with dark mud and clinging sand. What is it? I asked. My voice was calm, more out of habit and exhaustion than kindness. Even back then, I already felt stinking old and worn out. Life had taught me long ago that panic rarely solved anything. Raya, he went. The rest of her words were drowned out by sobs. Hey, slow down. Take a breath. Raya, the mangrove forest after school. The words spilled out between sharp, frantic brass. She pressed a trembling hand against her chest, struggling for air. Hasn't come home. I reached down and took her shaking hands, pulling her gently but firmly back to her feet. She felt almost weightless, as if fear had hollowed her out. Did he sneak off to fish again? That stubborn little son of a gun. I muttered through clenched teeth as we hurried toward the village. Our steps quick and uneven. Please, she sobbed, her shoulders shaking violently as she tried to keep up with me. Find him, please. I sat her down on the rickety chair in my front porch. The wood creaked as she shifted to look up at me, her eyes glassy and unfocused. Long strands of her dark hair had come loose and stuck to her wet cheeks and neck. Looking at her like that, I remembered the day she and her son first came into my life. I had been living on my own for years, minding my own business, before Nerina arrived in the village with her small son in tow. She introduced herself to me privately as my late wife's distant relative. Her story was simple and heartbreaking. She had been forced into an arranged marriage, and after years of that, she had made the difficult decision to leave, taking her two-year-old son with her. That was how she had ended up here. And to avoid the gossip and drama that the village could barely contain, I introduced her as my own distant and much younger relative from my mother's side, someone that I barely knew. And just like that, the villagers had welcomed her and Reyes if they had always been one of us. Over the years, she had proved to be a quiet, dependable presence. She helped around the house, managed things while I was out fishing, and she was an excellent cook. In return, sending her son to school seemed more than enough for a woman in a small coastal village to hope for. In the first few months, there were nights that she would linger at my doorway after Reya had gone to bed, watching me sleep with an expectant look that I understood perfectly. I was no fool, old perhaps, and less educated than her, but not blind to meaning when it stood right in front of me. I expected nothing at all, and I made that clear. I was simply grateful not to face the rest of my days alone, miserable and unnoticed. I had someone to care for now, and that was enough. Please, she had pleaded again, her fingers tightening around my hands. I stayed with her for a while, long enough to calm her shaking breasts, speaking in low, steady tones until her panic dulled to something quieter and more manageable. I'll find him and bring him back, I told her. From the pained look on her face, I knew she understood what that might mean. She nodded, gripping my hands so tightly that it almost hurt. I've told you so many times, I went on. That forest near the river is dangerous. People have disappeared there. Some of them were never seen again. No one in their right mind goes anywhere near it. She nodded again, silently. Tears rolling down her sunburnt cheeks. But I wasn't done. Hey, you need to teach that boy to listen, I said. If you tell him to stay away from a place, he stays away. Next time you pull something like this. I shook my head. I'll deal with it myself. When she seemed stable enough, I took her next door and asked my neighbor and her daughter to keep her company and to not leave her alone. And then I went straight to the village head's house, where a handful of men were playing ping pong in its spacious and shady front yard. I told them what had happened and they all agreed to help search for Rhea. Among them was Hassan, a young marine science student from the city who had been staying temporarily with the village head and his family for some research project. I never bothered to learn the details. City people love their names and titles, as if the right words can make them belong anywhere. I had never liked intruders, people who knew nothing of the sea, who couldn't read the wind or the water, and yet act as if they understood the place after just a few weeks of observation and note taking. They disrupted the village's quiet, deliberate rhythm, a rhythm shaped over generations by tides, storms, and loss. To me, they were a constant irritation, a foreign weight pressing against something long and settled. And this one in particular, broad-shouldered and loud, with his sharp city accent and careless confidence, embodied everything that I despised. He had a crude, vulgar sense of humor, and he seemed determined to share it with the entire world. Whenever he opened his mouth, it was usually to mock something or someone. Most people take time to understand. It takes patience to really see who somebody is beneath the surface. But he was an exception. He wore his irritating personality openly, almost proudly. Within a few days, it was obvious what kind of man he was. He ticked every box for an obnoxious schmuck. For reasons I never quite understood, the village youths adored him. They treated him like some sort of older brother, trailing after him through the village like a pack of eager puppies. It didn't take long before his city slang started creeping into their speech. Soon, they were all imitating his cool accent. Still, beggars can't be choosers, and we had a child to find. Villages knew better than to wander too deep into the mangrove forest along the western coast. Nobody crossed the river without a good reason, and no one ever ventured into the unexplored stretches beyond it. Saltwater crocodiles were no met. Sightings had grown rare, but every few years, one turned up again, basking on the riverbank or drifting silently toward the open sea in search of prey. If that's what we were dealing with, then I needed every able-bodied man that I could get, the city oaf included. Word spread quickly through the village that a boy had gone missing. Before long, people were crowding into the front yard, some eager to help, others just there to feed their appetite for a bit of village drama. As we left the outskirts of the village and slipped into the mangrove forest, the air thickened almost immediately, damp and heavy against my skin. The salty breeze from the open sea fitted behind us, replaced by the stagnant smell of brackish water and rotting leaves. The ground beneath our feet grew softer with every step, dark mud sucking at our shoes and releasing with a wet, reluctant sound. The thin mangrove roots pushed up from the earth everywhere, sharp and crooked like hundreds of black spikes, forcing us to watch every step that we took. The air buzzed with insects, mosquitoes whined near our ears and somewhere deeper in the swamp, a chorus of unseen creatures chirped and rasped in the shadows. Every now and then, something splashed quietly in one of the narrow tidal channels winding through the mangroves, sending small ripples through the dark water. It was the kind of place where sound carried strangely. A snapped twig or shifting branch seemed to echo farther than it should have. And, after only a few minutes inside, the village already felt very far away. With every step, a dull ache began to bloom in my feet. The soles of my old shoes were worn nearly smooth, scuffed and split from years of crab hunting along the eastern coast, where a long, narrow bite cut into the land and curled inland. It had always been the safer place to glean, sheltered from the worst of the tides and sudden swells, but still the miles had taken their toll. The leather bit into my heels and I felt every stone and crooked root beneath my feet. I could really have used a new pair. My poor old feet had carried me further than I had ever given them credit for. Hassan suddenly fell into step beside me. His massive shoes and nearly stepping on my old bony feet. I winced away at once, trying to put distance between us, but he stayed close, crowding my stride. The moment that he opened his mouth, I was reminded exactly why I disliked him. That daughter of yours, sir. He said with a grin that made my skin crawl, a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. I didn't answer. I kept my eyes fixed on the narrow path ahead, carefully picking my way between the mangrove roots and pretending that he hadn't spoken. It was still early afternoon and the sun hung high above the forest, but beneath the tangled canopy of branches and leaves, very little of that warmth reached us. The light filtered down in thin, broken shafts that barely touched the muddy ground. The deeper that we went, the deeper it grew, and strangely enough, the air began to feel colder. She's kind of hot, he went on, flashing a set of crooked, nicotine stained teeth. I licked it in, blinking once and then again. It took every bit of restraint I had to not drive my fingers into a small, beady eyes right then and there. Hot, I repeated, my voice flat with disgust. Never in my life had I heard someone reduce another human being to such a small, contemptuous word. Hot, that was all she was to him. Oh, that's what we call pretty girls back in the city. He said with a chuckle, flicking his cigarette into the mud. You think a widowed woman like her would ever go for a younger guy. Someone like me. For a moment, I couldn't even form a reply. My thoughts tangled, my jaw tightened as I struggled to decide which response would end with blood on my hands. Well, he giggled, pleased with himself. Maybe if I managed to find her son alive. He strode past me, his boots crunching loudly through wet leaves, leaving me behind in the thickening shadows, seething, unsettled, muttering curses under my breath. Our group numbered around 20 men, most of them like fishermen myself. They knew this coastline well enough, but none of them were familiar with the stretch of forest that lay beyond the river miles ahead, or what might be waiting there. Like everybody else in the village, we had grown up hearing the same warnings about crossing the edge of the mangroves. It showed on their faces. More than a few looked tense and wary as we set out. An hour passed. The forest grew thicker and dimmer as we pushed deeper inside. The trees loomed taller around us, their trunks twisted and swollen, their roots tangled together in knotted masses that rose from the mud like clusters of dark, knobbly bones. Every step had to be placed carefully. We tried to stay close together, but the terrain made it difficult. Mangrove roots jutted out everywhere, and narrowed channels of black water forced us to weave and circle around them. Before long, keeping everybody within sight of one another became nearly impossible. To my irritation, Hassan and two of the village boys who followed them around like eager puppies began shoving each other into the mud as a joke, laughing as if we were on some kind of picnic instead of a search for a missing child. For a moment, I considered telling them off and sending them back to the village, but the moment that we waded across a shallow, brackish pool and stepped deeper into the forest, my anger abbed and was replaced by something older and far heavier. I had not set foot near this forest in years until that day. I had never needed to. It had always been a place best left alone, a boundary rather than a destination. Life had given me no reason to return, at least not until then. Not until a boy had gone missing. A boy whose mother, with a strange mix of reverence and familiarity, had taught him to call me grandpa. My thoughts involuntarily slipped back nearly 60 years. I had only just begun to doze off when a sharp cry rang out from the thickets of tall grass in front of me. I gasped, eyes wide, struggling to grasp what was happening. But before my thoughts could gather, several things had happened at once. A brutal, swift kick landed on the back of my neck, wrenching a strangled yelp from me like a stray dog, followed immediately by the rapid stutter of gunfire crackling through the darkness, shattering the quiet night. A soldier, a seito, barked at me, and then raised his boot to strike again. This time he missed, the toe of his shoe slamming into the ground instead, kicking up a spray of wet sand and muck that splattered across my face. Before I could scramble out of reach, he had seized a fistful of my hair and began dragging me along the Money River bank. I didn't understand the words that he hurled at me, but I understood the cruelty well enough. I dared not even groan. I simply stumbled along, hunched in silent. He growled in a low voice, while four other soldiers crept behind us, careful not to make a sound that might betray their presence. We marched on, unsure which way to go. A small lantern glowing dimly in the darkness was our only source of light. The weak flame flickered with every step, throwing long and crooked shadows across the tangled roots around us. A satyr raised the lantern above his head for a moment, slowly turning in place as he studied the darkness, as if trying to find a path hidden somewhere beyond the reach of the light. And then he moved around the knobby trunk of a massive mangrove tree. The rest was followed. I drew a quiet breath, wondering whether I would make it out of the jungle alive and what might await me if I did. Would they let me go? Or would I share the fate of my cousin whom these very men had beheaded weeks earlier? The sound of Seto's long and gleaming sword cutting through his neck beneath the low rustle of wind moving through the tall grass would ring in my ears and haunt my dreams forever. My bare feet grew numb as we continued through the swamp's cold wet soil, my joints aching from the ocean wind whispering through the mangrove trees. They had taken my shoes from me. Running would have been futile anyway in the treacherous, uneven terrain, where every step had demanded caution. Barefoot I had been forced under the sharp shells and jagged barnacles hidden along the ground, their edges slicing into my soles into warm blood as slipped the mud beneath my feet. I thought of my parents and siblings. Dad, murdered years ago. That was when I had lost all the desire to live. I mean, what was the point? The wounds in my soul had never stopped bleeding. The pain a constant companion. The sooner it ended, the better or so I thought. But that night as I crept beneath the dense canopy with my captors, something unexpected stirred inside me. However broken I may have been since losing my family, my primitive instinct for survival was not completely lost. A quiet urge, born not from peace but from pain, whispered from the depths of my battered body. A renewed desire to live. I realized that I desperately wanted to feel the touch of the morning sun and the sea breeze again. As Seto whispered to the broad-shouldered man beside him, Kymura, even in the faint glow of Seto's lantern, I noticed something different in their faces. Gone was their swagger, and in its place, tension and fear. I took some small satisfaction in that. The sounds of the swamp, the night birds, insects, croaking frogs, they chanted around us as we pressed on through darkness in search of a way out that never seemed to appear. After nearly three hours of slogging, my legs were almost numb when Seto finally called a rest. He dropped against the thick roots of a mangrove tree, his pale face lit by the dull yellow lantern, his rifle rested across his chest. He cast me a disgusted glance and muttered a string of curses and warnings under his breath. My heart thudded as I looked at him, sweaty, tired, half asleep. I hated this man with everything that I had. I understood then that escape was no longer an option. He was not bluffing. Kimura said something quietly to him, and Seto gave a half-hearted grunt, already closing his eyes. The other man had settled into uneasy rest. Don't even think about escaping. Kimura said, switching to my native language, his rifle aimed into the dark behind Seto's sleeping form. If you do, I might still show mercy and grant you a quick death. He glanced at Seto. He won't. I nodded, watching the flame flicker in Kimura's eyes. Unlike him, I don't kill because I enjoy it. He lit a cigarette, exhaling smoke through his nose and lips and thick white plumes. Then why do it? I asked, suddenly, surprising even myself. Kimura turned his face upward, studying me. I'm just a soldier. I follow orders, same as everybody else out here. He said, gesturing toward the forest. In war, it's not about wanting or not wanting. It's about proving loyalty in any way required. You don't have to kill to do that, I replied. Kimura gave a tired smile. Oh, some of us don't get to choose. Let me tell you something. When I first arrived in your country, I fell in love with its beauty. That's why I started learning your language, partly to advance my career, but mostly because I wanted to understand. He took a long drag, exhaled the smoke through his nose and went on. The deeper I delved into your customs, the more I realized war would destroy every trace of what I admired. I was a farmer from a quiet mountain rage before I was conscripted and sent here. For what? To destroy, to raise everything into ash. He shook his head and crushed the last of his cigarette against a mangrove road. Out there, anyone not on your side is the enemy. Their humanity doesn't matter. And to be honest, and not speaking for my comrades, each time I've taken a life, appease me died with them. My empathy, my soul. Call it what you will. When this war ends and it well, I know the ghosts will follow me until the day that I die. The chimera lit up again and offered me the cigarette. I accepted it gracefully, hoping the heat would push back against the cold settling into my bones. In the end, we're all pawns in somebody else's game, he murmured. Sacrifices must be made. Not for victory, but for balance. There are no winners in war, only grief. Somewhere deep in the forest, a night bird sang a lovely bitter song. Its call echoed among the trees, bleeding into every dark corner of the night. As Satoh suddenly snapped upright with his rifle aimed into the dark, Chimera lifted both hands to calm him down. They murmured quietly to each other in their native tongue, and then Satoh rose and disappeared into the trees. Need to relieve yourself? Chimera asked me, better do it now, we'll be moving again before daybreak. I shook my head, flicking the cigarette into a puddle of thick mud. Are you going to kill me? I asked quietly. Chimera studied me for a long time before answering. I don't know. We brought you as our guide, you know this terrain. Maybe our pursuers will hesitate if they see a local among us. I nodded again, fear still anchored deep within my chest. Oh, don't worry, he added. If it comes to that, I'll do it myself. Like I said, quick and painless. Saito won't dare argue with me. I'll even try to convince him to let you live. You're young, you got a future ahead of you. I don't want to rob you from that. I frowned, unsure of whether to feel grateful or afraid. Kamiura opened his mouth to wake his men, but a sudden scream, sharp and shrill tore through the forest from the direction that Saito had gone. I hunched back until my spine struck a tree. The other men jolted awake and leapt to their feet, aiming their rifles toward the sound. Kamiura snatched up the lantern and crept forward, gripping his rifle tightly. We followed, trembling from head to toe. Had the enemies caught up already? Impossible. We had traveled miles, trudging through mangrove swamps and saltwater marshes to avoid capture. There was no way they could have found us here. When we reached the edge of a murky pool, Kamiura halted. The lantern cast a sickly glow across the water, where large bubbles now broke the surface in slow, gurgling bursts. But there was no sign of Sado. We all stood frozen, paralyzed in horror, and then a splash. A long, jagged tail cut the surface, vanishing as quickly as it had appeared. I stumbled backward at tripping over a root and landing hard in the mud. My blood ran cold. We hadn't seen it, and the dim light we couldn't have. But now it was too late. Swamp crocodile, I whispered. We've wandered into their territory. A second crocodile emerged silently from the underbrush. Without warning, it had lunged at the nearest man, clamping its massive jaws around his midsection and dragging him into the swamp. His scream tore into the night. Kamura's lantern hit the ground and rolled into a puddle. Darkness swallowed us. I stared at the rippling water. I had heard tales as a child, villagers vanishing while searching for crabs never to be seen again. I had dismissed them then, believing they were nothing more than cautionary tales to scare children. But now I knew better. Kamura shouted, switching back to his own language, no longer caring who might hear. We fled blindly, stumbling through mud and over roots as more splashes echoed from all directions. Panic had turned to pure instinct, but we kept running. How much farther to the hills? Kamura asked between breaths as he passed me and took the lead. Not far, just a few more kilometers along the coast. He spat in frustration and whispered urgently over his shoulder to his remaining man. They looked pale and shaken. I didn't need to understand their language to see the fear in their eyes. Dawn's coming. Once it's light out, they'll spot us easily. And get us out of here and maybe, just maybe, we'll let you live. Kamura said. I nodded and quickened my pace. For nearly an hour, we pressed forward through the clinging mangroves. Somewhere in the darkness, the crocodiles still lurked, hungry and alert. Time was running out. The end of this flight would either bring life or death. And my feet had gone numb from the cold and the pain. Each step felt dull and distant, as though they no longer quite belonged to me. A thirst clawed at my throat and hunker gnawed relentlessly at the pit of my stomach. My body felt as though it had been pushed far beyond its limits, stretched thin by exhaustion and stubborn well. Still I did not stop. This march could not go on forever. Even the longest and most desperate retreat had to end somewhere. Where this one would lead me, I tried not to imagine. The silence around us grew heavy as we moved through the darkness, pressing in from every side like a weight on the chest. Now and then it was broken by the low, restless murmurs of my captors, uneasy whispers carried between them in the dark. Their voices were tense, edged with the nervousness they tried and failed to hide. Even they could feel it. Something about the forest was wrong. Finally we had reached the river mouth. The open sea stretched before us, waves breaking gently beneath the hum of nocturnal insects. The salty air hung thick. Where's the bridge? Kameera asked. I stared him in the eye as I answered. There is no bridge. What do you mean? He snapped. You asked me to guide you through territory that the white soldiers never patrol. This part of the jungle has never been charted. Not even by my people. There is no bridge. We have to cross the river. He approached the river bank with caution. The river wasn't wide, maybe 50 meters across, but it was deep, dark, and silent. No bridge. He asked again, almost to himself. I stepped into the water, the soft splash echoing faintly in the dark. Move slowly, don't splash. They sense movement. Kameera turned to his men, nodded and followed. Their feet sank into the knee-deep silt, water whispering cold around them. The sky was paleing, morning was nearer. Pellen, Pellen, I repeated, quieter this time. Nanti Dia Dengar. Dia? Kameera asked, confused by my words. I turned, pressing a finger to my lips. Shhh, quiet. Why are you calling it Dia? His voice quivered. Isn't that word used only for appeal? Kameera never finished. A shriek shattered the silence. Behind them, a pair of thin and long green hands suddenly burst from the river and yanked one of his men under. Screaming erupted. We thrashed toward the opposite bank, desperate and terrified. But another flash and another pair of claws, and the river had claimed its second victim. Now, only us two remained. We swam, arms burning, legs heavy. Kameera's rifle vanished beneath the surface, lost forever. He didn't care. All he wanted was to reach solid ground. I reached the far bank first, grabbing a thick root and pulling myself up with a surprising ease. Kameera was just behind me, but he struggled, weighed down by his muscular frame. Help me! He gasped, clawing at the river bank. I reached down instinctively, grabbing his arm. But then I paused. Our eyes met, and in that moment, I saw the truth in his face. The soldier who had shown me kindness, who had spoken of his home, his sorrow, his soul. He wasn't a monster. He was a man just like me, a victim of the same cruel war. Please, he begged. I hesitated, and then I let go. Quick and painless, I murmured. He splashed back into the river, and the water erupted. Two scaled arms wrapped around him like a lover's embrace, and dragged him into the deep. He didn't scream. A pair of yellow eyes glowed beneath the surface, locking onto me before vanishing, and then silence. I sat still for a long time staring into the river, listening to the distant rumble of the ocean. I knew now what the elders of the village had feared for generations. It wasn't the crocodiles, it was something worse. Something ancient, something that understood. If it wanted to taste sweet, tender human flesh again, it had to let me live. When the sun finally rose and bathed the swamp in light, I stepped back into the river to begin the long journey home. I stood at the grassy edge of the river staring down into these still murky water waiting in silence. Far off, the low roar of waves crashing at the river mouth drifted through the air, a reminder that high tide was on its way. Soon the water would rise and swallow the banks, creeping inward until the forest surrendered to it once more. The sooner this place was left alone, the better. Still I did not move an inch. I kept my eyes fixed on the surface, unblinking. A smaller hand suddenly broke through the surface of the water pale and trembling, fingers stiff with cold. For a brief, terrible moment it faltered, as if about to sink back beneath the surface. I lunged forward, grabbed hold, and hauled the rest of his body out of the river and into my arms. The boy erupted into violent gasps the moment that he's free, his chest hitching as he sucked in air, coughing and retching, water pouring from him and soaking my clothes. Grandpa! He cried weakly, salt water spilling from his nose and mouth as his body shook. Easy, I murmured, holding him close and patting his back as he bent forward and emptied his stomach onto the grass. Easy, boy. Any anger that I might once have felt over his disobedience had long since drained away, leaving only relief into deep, settling exhaustion. After a few more minutes of gagging, crying, and shuddering breaths, his breathing finally studied. I lifted his fragile body into my arms and began walking back toward the village. It took me hours to make my way back through the forest alone in the darkness, carrying the boy in my arms. He was soaked through and trembling. His small body pressed tightly against my chest as I struggled to find a path through the treacherous mangroves. When I finally stumbled out from the treeline, the familiar scent of salt drifting in from the ocean greeted me like a long-awaited relief. People were already gathered on the porch of the village head's house. The moment Nerina saw her son curled against my chest, she let out a sound so raw that it barely resembled a scream. She ran toward us sobbing. He's fine, I shouted over her cries. He's fine, I told you that I'd bring him back. She collapsed to her knees in the damp earth and torn him from my arms, pulling him into a fierce and desperate embrace. Her tears carved clean tracks through the grime on his cheeks as she pressed her face into the crook of his neck, breathing a man, as though scent alone might convince her heart that he was truly alive. The village once buzzing with tense whispers and anxious murmurs that fell into a respectful hush, only Norena's broken rhythmic sobbing remained. I noticed the expressions of the men who had accompanied me into the forest earlier, relief tangled with guilt in their eyes. They must have returned before sunset. Nobody wanted to stay in there after dark and I couldn't blame them. The village head approached me, worry still etched deep into his face. I know you must be exhausted, he began. But have you seen? I shook my head firmly. He stopped mid-sentence, still looking unsure, before giving a quiet nod. I knelt beside Norena and rested a hand on her trembling shoulder. Her hands moved frantically over her son, checking his arms and legs for injuries while his exhausted body clung to her unwilling to let go. Come, I said softly, let's go home. The boy's been through enough. And gently, I loosened his grip on his mother and lifted him back into my arms. He did not resist. And my feet still ached with every step, but the pain no longer mattered. Soon enough, they would not ache at all. Not in my new pair of shoes, two sizes larger than the old ones. This episode is sponsored by Rocket Money. I had one of those moments recently where I finally sat down and looked at my finances and I immediately regretted it. 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After a near run-in with death at the hands of a gunman who had emptied my pockets and left me, thankfully with my life. Nature to me was supposed to be an escape from all that. But when I took the job in a Midwestern national park, the name of which I won't share with you, I learned very quickly that danger garbs itself in so many different ways. You see, in the city, danger was loud and fierce and immediate. And I'll admit that in those rural crevices of the world, far from man and civilization, danger can be much the same. When facing a wild animal, for instance, the fear response is much the same. I didn't go into this link of work with the belief that I would be in a bubble, as life is always a risk in and of itself. Nature would bring a new set of unpredictable risks, in the form of wildlife, and I was aware of that. I was prepared for it. I wasn't prepared for that other kind of danger, which people don't talk about, or at least the ones who do talk about it are met with disbelief the majority of the time. I'm talking about unearthly danger. I'm talking about things that don't align with the general public's dominant belief system, certainly in the Western world, about everything in life having a rational explanation, about there being no such things as paranormal or spiritual anomalies who sit in a variance with the natural world around them. I never really leaned one way or the other when it came to such talk. My grandfather told me about the time that he had seen a ghost as a boy, and I simply nodded, perching atop my fence, unwilling to take a stance one way or the other. Well, having seen what I've seen since starting my job as a park ranger in this vast, back country wilderness, I now have very firm and fixed beliefs. There are things in the woods, and there is no grounded or logical explanation for them. Dick, is that right? I asked Harry, the gray haired, a 70-something-year-old ranger who was showing me the ropes when we met at his watchtower. My eyes widened. I beg your pardon. The man frowned and looked down at his clipboard on the desk. It says here your name's Dick. It was my turn to frown. Richard, I go by Richard. Ah, said Harry, and then he grumbled to himself, crossed out the name with a ballpoint pen, and tutted to himself as he wrote down my proper name. That'll be Gram that you met then. At the interview, I mean. A bit of a dick himself, truth be told. Fancies himself a comedian, but doesn't quite know how to walk the line between comedy and... Dickery. I finished. Harry chuckled. Someone ought to put that word in the dictionary, with Gram's name right next to it. Yeah, Dickery. That's Gram to a T. Sure you wouldn't rather be a poet than a ranger. No, sir, I said with a shake of my hat. You're pretty young. That means I have fresh legs. I said proving my point by nodding at the door to the tower, outside which were hundreds of metal treads that I had swiftly ascended. I had not broken a sweat, but I was certainly stifling my labored breathing so as to make a good impression. Harry nodded. Yeah, those steps are a killer for most of us, that's for sure. But being a park ranger takes more than fresh legs, Richard. There's a reason I keep around dicks like Graham. For all his faults, he knows these parts like the back of his hand, and he keeps hikers, campers, and his fellow rangers safe. Every life that he's saved has earned him a little bit of. Harry paused to look down at my crossed out nickname on his clipboard. A little bit of dickery. Understood sir, I said. Sweating as I feared that I was about to be fired before even starting the job. But all those rangers had to start somewhere to write. Oh, they did, a great Harry. But I give this speech to every new hires so don't take it personally, Richard. This is more for your sake. You moved from the city, didn't you? That's right. Well, the forest ain't like the city. No, it certainly isn't, sir. But that's why I came out here. This is what I wanted. Want. I needed to get away from the concrete and back into the outdoors. Well, the actual outdoors, I mean. I was floundering, sweating under the pressure. Word dueling with Harry was more fatiguing than the climb up the metal staircase had been. What I mean, sir, is that there's a beauty to nature. I'm not going back to the city. This is the life that I want now. Harry wasn't convinced. But you could just as easily have found a job out in the town, couldn't you? A nice, normal office job. And then you could have spent your mornings taking a nice stroll around the park. Wouldn't that have achieved the same goal? No, sir, I want to be a ranger. I used to be a boy scout, and I loved the great outdoors. I loved hiking, I loved camping, exploring. I don't just want to go for pleasant strolls, sir. I want to work out here in nature, with the beauty of all of this around me. Hairy side. Yeah, that's always the response I get. Don't fault me for trying, at least, when we next talk. My furrowed brow deepened its folds. Sir, I'm not quite sure that I understand. Why do you always try to talk new recruits out of the job? Gotta test whether they're up to it, I guess. Desupposed. The ones who are, they can withstand a little bit of resistance. Of course, you think a slightly hostile talk is bad. Then you're gonna have a hell of a shock when you work your first late shift. I don't think this is hostile, sir, I said. An involuntary gulp, snaking up my throat. I'm just curious. What should I know about this line of work? What's gonna shock me about the late shift? I want to be prepared. In a way to prepare for this job, boy, said Harry. Abigail will show you the ropes today, and hopefully you'll have a nice, easygoing, non-eventive shift. I pray for that boy. I really do. I hooked my thumbs through my belt purely to keep them steady, hide their jitters from the boss who was judging my every move, gauging my readiness for this job. I'll be fine, sir. I'll earn quickly and I'll keep people safe. And to make it all better, I won't cause you any grief like Gram. Terry didn't laugh this time. He was wholly solemn and sincere by this point, as he nodded at the door and gave me a final piece of advice. Head on down to see her at the station now. She'll be waiting for you. One last warning which I'm sure that Abigail will give you, but I want to lodge it in your head first. No whistling after Dark Richard. I didn't frown or answer back or do anything that might give away my nerves. I just nodded as firmly as I could, and then I whirled my legs to steadily back out of the office. I managed to do so without tripping over my own heels, which was nothing short of a miracle. Then I descended the stairs, allowing myself to let out a big sigh of relief and wipe a bit of sweat from my brow. Once I was well out of eye shot from the large window panes which lined the four sides of the elevated watchpost. As I made my way down the stairs and then through the forest towards Abigail's ground level station, I started to wonder whether Harry might be right, whether I had in fact made a terrible mistake by taking on this job. Not because I actually feared anything in the woods, but rather the Rangers themselves. Firstly, there had been Graham, the middle-aged man with a slightly abrasive sense of humor. I had noted that much with his thinly veiled insults at my expense during the interview. And I hadn't even seen that he had put my name down incorrectly on the clipboard. It was one hell of a shock to me when I got the job, because I had been absolutely certain that the man had hated me. But given what Harry had said, that was just Graham with his penchant for dickery. I could have dealt with that. One unfunny colleague, fine. But Harry was a different kettle of fish. He didn't frustrate me, he unnerved me. He hadn't said a single thing about what I should fear about the forest, other than what I might infer from that crumb of guidance about not whistling after dark. It was more about what he didn't say, or should say, what his eyes said. Those old, withered brown pupils, weathered by not time but things seen, terrible things I sensed, and I'd never sensed such a thing about a person's eyes before. There we go, I thought with a sigh. Abigail's log cabin post coming into view. You've been a ranger for five minutes in dirty, entertaining, superstitious thinking about men whose eyes tell ghost stories. You could walk away right now, Richard. You could find a better job in the town like Harry suggested. You would still be in the sticks, and you would still be surrounded by nature, able to go on pleasant country walks whenever you wish so. You would still be in a far better position than you were in the city. That would surely be enough. But it wouldn't. I knew that. I wasn't going back to the corporate grind, even at some small town marketing firm, which was about all I would have been qualified to do in the area, save for jobs at local diners or retail stores, perhaps. None of that interested me, however. The woods did. Harry's speech for new recruits was a test, I decided, and I was going to pass it with flying colors by shrugging it off, proving that I would not so easily be phased by a stern glance and ominous tone. And I certainly wouldn't be phased by some obscure rule, a ban on whistling in the forest of all things. I puffed my chest out, mustered up my steadiest disposition, and I strolled into Abigail's cabin with as much confidence as I could fake. The attractive young ranger inside, perhaps ten years older than me, seemed to read me immediately. She squinted, eyed me up and down, and smiled as she put her hands on her hips. It looks like Harry worked his magic, as always, she sighed. I went through the same five years ago. I smiled weakly. He's an interesting man. Oh, he's a few cents short of a dollar, said Abigail with a giggle. I laughed. Well, given you're still working here after five years, I'm assuming it's just a little test of character or something for new recruits, right? I get it. I need to be hearty. I shouldn't be scared of the forest if I want to be a real ranger. I wouldn't say that's the case at all, said Abigail, still smiling warmly, but speaking with absolute sincerity. If you want to be a real ranger, you should absolutely be scared of the forest. I paled a little. I'm sure, bears, wolves. Sure, she replied, but there are more than animals in these parts. People, I said. Right, that makes sense. Oh yes, we've run into a fair few problems there over the years. But there's something else, Richard. I won't skirt around it because it seems like Harry did, and that just isn't fair to you. There's something in these woods that, well, after five years, I still don't know how to explain. Harry told you about our rule, didn't he? Well, we've got plenty of rules as rangers, of course. I'm sure that you read the contract. But I'm talking about that one rule in particular, which probably stood out to you. I nodded. No whistling after dark. No whistling after dark, Abigail repeated. If you whistle, it'll hear you and it'll come running. What will? I asked. People have lots of different stories about it, she answered cryptically. Some of them would make you laugh, I'm sure. Most of them you probably heard at one point or another. All wrong, all of them. Every last one. But not wholly wrong. I guess there's a grain of truth in every folk story. And just because everybody gets it wrong doesn't mean there's no such thing as. She paused, seemed to choose a word in her mind, and then rethought and picked a better one. Or one that would, perhaps, not draw a laugh out of me. Evil. Evil. I repeated with a raised brow. Evil, she asserted. It's evil whatever it is and it'll come if you whistle. I don't know whether it's an animal or... No, that's a lie. I do know. It's nothing of this world, Richard. It just isn't. I've seen it about a dozen times in my stint as a ranger, and I was in denial at first, but I'm not anymore. The things that I've seen it do, and the things that I've heard and thought and felt just don't make sense. Describe it to me, I said, not as a barked order but with gingerness and curiosity, as I didn't want to be rude to my new co-worker, no matter how delusional she seemed. People talk about seeing strange bears and Sasquatches in these parts. Abigail said with a sigh, I think they've all seen this thing instead. It ain't a bear and it ain't Bigfoot. It looks like it has a form, a body, hair, and animal-like claws and paws. At first, it looks like something that might, in the right light, make sense. But that's because it always comes out at night, when it's cloaked by the dark. That's how it tricks, you see. You tell yourself, I don't know what I saw, but it had to have been an animal. It had to have been. And it goes about, anonymous and undetected by the world at large, wreaking hell wherever it goes. And it is a creature of hell. It ain't a peaceful thing, make no mistake, Richard. I'm only alive because I've had someone to guide me in those early days, and I put his lessons to practice when I eventually faced the thing for myself. Now I'm gonna pass those lessons on to you. Did you whistle? I asked. Is that why I came for you? She frowned. You think I'd be stupid enough to break that rule once, let alone twelve times? I shrugged. You might have been curious the first time. She nodded. I was, but I didn't want to get on Gram's bad side. Of course it was Gram who had trained her and saved her skin, I thought. Resisting the urge to roll my eyes, and that's how he earns his dickery credits from Harry, by saving Rangers and using that as a shield for his future transgressions. So if you didn't whistle and the thing didn't hear you, I started. Abigail shook her head. That rule ain't some magic pass to safety, Richard. It's kind of like telling campers not to leave food out in the open. It's a good rule to follow as it stops bears or other wildlife from being attracted to their campsites. But it doesn't mean those campers aren't going to run into bears at all. You get my drift? Sure, I said. She sighed. Oh, you don't yet, Richard, but you will. And I'm guessing you still want this job, given your peppy attitude. I do. Well, don't say I didn't warn you. People go missing in these parts, and the rucks nearly always to blame. The sun set quickly, and maybe it had set just as quickly when I had been in the city the night before, but I certainly hadn't noticed. The light pollution might have been to blame for them, or perhaps the high rises were to blame. And the stacks of glass and steel piled up to the heavens, blotting out all, of course, I never really looked up. And that might also have been the problem. Everyone kept their eyes to the ground and that urban sprawl. So even if I got out of the office before sunset, which was a rarity in the wintertime anyway, or I ventured out and about in the city at the weekend during my time off, I wouldn't really watch the sun glide across the rise end. This was something that I hadn't really witnessed since I was a boy, and it was beautiful. I bet you never get sick of this view. I told Abigail as we did the rounds, watching the sky turn orange through openings between patches of leaf canopy overhead. She shrugged. I rolled my eyes. I guess I'll be the same in a year or so, taking nature for granted. Oh, it's not that rich. The park is beautiful. The sunsets beautiful. All of it is beautiful. But I just prefer the day shift. It's hard to appreciate a sunset, no matter how gorgeous the shade of sky, when you know what comes next. The rest of that first shift went by without incident, and Abigail looked a little flushed in the cheeks as if she could tell what I was thinking, that this park ranger and all of the park rangers must have lost their marbles, if they were true believers of a ghost story about some sasquatch-like entity in the forest. And truthfully, that was exactly what I was thinking, but I offered her a kind smile to let her know that I was friendly, to let her know that I wasn't going to engage in any dickery like Gram. I would respect her beliefs. And this was how our joint shifts went for many weeks, day in and day out, the same routine. Abigail showed me the ropes, nightfall came, my shift ended, and there was nothing to report. I ran into my first black bear at the end of the first month, which was terrifying, but I was far enough away that it had passed me by, on the trail of some better meal, or on its merry way back to its habitat, perhaps. It was after two months that it first happened, something strange, I mean. Not necessarily frightening, but definitely strange. I came across a tree on a trail with a puddle of dry blood at its base, and the bark was covered in scratch marks all the way up to the branches, but not a small spattering of scratch marks. No, these grooves cut into the tree by razor sharp talons or claws were coating at least in nine tenths of the bark, to the extent that more of the pale inner sapwood of the tree was showing than its dark bark on the outer layer. I radioed it in to Abigail and that was when the sickness set in. My radio made the most awful squealing noise as if I had tuned it into the space between frequencies before finally locking onto hers. The radio was an old piece of junk and I had been warned about that, but as I talked into the radio telling Abigail what had happened, I became aware of this awful nausea washing over me and this feeling of something approaching. Of course, as soon as I explained the situation, she came running. She was at my spot within five minutes and my flashlight caught her own pale face, as if she too were revealing the sapwood beneath her firm veil of bark, usually so adept at concealing the tears which I knew she always kept close to the surface. You see, she had knocked off the talk about the whistling, about the evil thing in the woods after that first shift, and I think she did so for my sake. But I always sensed her fear any time that we were on shift together. And now as she looked up at the tree that I had stumbled across, that fear was right there at the forefront. Back to my station. Now. The blood's dry, I commented, nodding at the puddle at the bottom of the bark. I think whatever did this is long gone. Oh, it's never long gone. She murmured with a shiver. It's always close, and you'll keep your voice down and come with me. But I've got to finish my patrol of the... Harry will understand. She interrupted, starting back. She wasn't going to ask me again. I knew that. And her desperation to flee that place, post haste, was enough for me too. For the very first time in my short career as a park ranger, I set aside my arrogance and consider that maybe, just maybe, I should listen to those who had been in these parts for longer than I had. I was into total ass, of course, as I had diligently followed the rule about not whistling. Then again, I had never been much of a whistler anyway, and I think I may have only been doing what I was told because, as crazy as I thought Abigail and Harry were, I didn't want to be fired, and certainly not over something as foolish as whistling on the job. I struggled to match Abigail's pace as we hurried back to the station. I thought that I had got myself in good shape with my new life as a park ranger, but this woman ten years my senior proved that I still had a long way to go, and I couldn't help thinking as we raced back, that if a bear were hunting us down, I would be the slow poke that it would devour first. And that thought was enough to hurry my scarper and dash into the ranger station behind Abigail. The door slammed behind us, and I was startled to find Graham standing there. I thought you two were lost out there, he said. I came as soon as, uh, Dick, um, Richard, radioed. Abigail panted. We were only gone a few minutes. That's all it takes, Graham said. So you left the tower unattended, asked Abigail. He scoffed. Would you rather I watch for forest fires than check that you two are okay? No, but, she sighed. Look, we're fine, Graham. So you can go back to your tower now. Probably safer up there than in here anyway. He shook his head. We'll all be safe right where we are, as long as we stay inside and stay calm until sunrise. Won't Harry chew us out over ditching our posts and patrols? I asked. Graham and Abigail looked at me as if I were adult, and perhaps I was adult at the time. But then their faces changed, even Graham's demeanor uncharacteristically softened. They remembered, I think, that I was new to the job, and I thank them for that now, because I would learn in no time at all just what terrified them about the forest. I would learn that they weren't so insane after all. Don't worry about Harry, said Graham. He'll understand. I told him that, Abigail added. But Richard doesn't know what he saw Graham. He nodded. I know that, and best we keep it that way for his sake. I'm standing right here, you know. I said, placing hands on my hips. I'm not a total buffoon. I've gathered that you're blaming those tree marks on your monster in the forest. Graham grumbled. Don't mock us, Richard. Am I not dick? I quipped. Yeah, you are right now. He quipped back. I laughed. Yeah, that's rich coming from you. Oh, don't squabble like children. Chastised Abigail. Both of you are raising your voices, so just zip your lips if you have nothing nice to say. And nothing to say quietly for that matter. Hey, as long as we whistle, we're fine. I said, that's right, ain't it? Ain't that simple? And Graham replied. Somebody was out on that trail, a young woman, a hiker. Maybe she whistled, maybe she didn't, but either way, she's gone now. Plenty of people go on this trail. Go, I repeated. He nodded. I saw her earlier. Never clocked her leaving the site. I just hoped that she had slipped through my fingers, but well, maybe she did leave. I'm being silly. My brain finally caught up. Sorry, you're saying that that wasn't animal blood. He's not saying that, Abigail said, shaking her head. Graham, we don't know that that wasn't a rabbit or something. Graham hummed, as if to soothe himself. I had never seen him rattle before, and it might have been enjoyable if I hadn't been rattled too. I don't know, Abigail, I just don't feel right about any of this. Either way, it's the Rook, it has to be. Abigail groaned, Oh, don't call it that. I wondered whether it had a name, I said. Why'd you call it the Rook? I ain't talking to you about it, because you're still mocking me, said Graham. I'm not mocking. Well, you don't believe us. Is that a crime? I asked. I have no reason to believe a story about some undiscovered animal roaming the park, hunting down tourists and being mistaken by locals for what? A Sasquatch. Graham shot Abigail a stern look. You told him that. No wonder he's not taking us seriously. Look, I'm not trying to be an ass, but you have to understand how crazy it sounds, I said. Those marks were made by a bear or something. And maybe you're right, maybe that young hiker is in danger. Maybe we should even phone it in. I hope she's okay, and I hope that that's just animal blood out there. But whatever happened will have an explanation. Everything has an explanation. Not everything, Richard, said Abigail. I'm sorry, but not everything. Well, should I phone in about the woman that you saw? I asked. Maybe I missed her. Graham whispered, eyes becoming despondent. Maybe she left the trail back to the car park and I just didn't see. It was a long walk back to the tower, you know. She might have left before I got back up there, and I can't see the parking lot even from up there, so maybe her car is gone. Maybe if we go there and look, her car will be gone. We're not going there and looking, said Abigail. We're staying inside where it's safe. As the two park rangers bickered, I wandered over the front window looking out at the surrounding trees shalt a night. I don't know whether I was drawn there to get away, from the racket of my two arguing colleagues to answer the beckon of the raised hairs on my skin. I told myself at the time that the fear only kicked in once I got to the window. But as I look back now these many weeks later, I am fairly certain that I felt the hairs raise on my skin first. I'm fairly certain that some primal fear drove me to the glass pane, or perhaps deeper than a primal fear, for I finally accepted the existence of something beyond the earthly and beyond the primal, as I looked out into the night. About 50 yards away from our cabin was a silhouette. A tall silhouette of something broadened if the scant moonlight spilling through the trees could be believed, coated in fur from head to toe. It would have made sense for it to be a bear, and if it had been, I would have felt fear as I had a month earlier when I came face to face with such a beast in the light of day. I remembered that feeling. The fear, the freeze response that my body assumed. I remembered exactly how I had felt when confronted with a black bear. It was terror that filled my body, but an unexplainable and grounded terror. This, this was different. This feeling as I eyed the silhouette in the near distance was like nothing that I had ever felt in my nearly three decades of life. It was like as my mouth had opened to soundlessly scream, my very soul had been vomited up, had splattered against the window pane, only to stare back at me in some outer body experience. I suddenly understood Abigail and Graham perfectly, understood what I had dismissed as a ghost story because they had no concrete evidence. There was no concrete evidence other than seen, and perhaps being in the general vicinity of the thing that Graham called the Rook. It stood on what could have been hind legs, which would explain why locals thought it an emaciated bear standing up. Perhaps and those locals would argue with the crazy locals who claimed it to be the Sasquatch. It seemed as Harry, Abigail, and Graham had been trying to explain to me for weeks that all the theories were wrong. This wasn't an animal, not even a mythical one. All I knew for sure as I eyed the thing moving around jankily in the distance was that this was something pretending, something pretending to be alive. It took me possibly about ten or twenty seconds of trying before I managed to get a hoarse sound to creep out of my slack jaw. I think Abigail and Graham wouldn't have noticed me if I had remained wordless, for they were too busy arguing among themselves as to what they should do about the missing girl and whether they should call Harry and whether the thing was out there. Richard, said Abigail, starting towards me, Richard, what's? The shape moved, disappearing into the trees, and I stumbled backwards, letting out a horrified gasp. Abigail caught me, and Graham immediately darted to the window pane, looking out into the night. You saw, didn't you? You saw the rug. What? What is it? I asked, shivering as Abigail tried to steady me. She clearly sensed that I was on the verge of passing out from the shock of feeling whatever I had just felt. Oh, not such a cocky little guy now, are ya? asked Graham. Oh, shut up, you douche, Abigail said. Richard was only being an ass to you because you've been an ass to him since day one. And Graham muttered something under his breath, acting as a child being scolded by his mother. And for that matter, I was exactly the same when I started, continued Abigail. I didn't believe a word of it until the first night that I saw it. She shivered. It was my fault. Graham shook his head. It wasn't your fault. It was, she asserted. It was. I made the sound and I drew the root to us. You didn't whistle. You did as you were told. It sounded like a whistle, though, Abigail said. It's any high-pitched sound, Richard. That's what I think. I drank from my water flask and the way the lid scraped against the bottle. Metal against metal was shrill and squeaky. I drew it out of hiding. Hey, we don't know that, Graham said. The rook isn't always drawn by sound. Sometimes it just finds you. I massaged my head with my fingers and sat down in an armchair, looking into the empty fireplace and wishing that the logs would spontaneously set alight. An orange flame licking at my face, bringing light and warmth into the lounge of the ranger station. It would certainly make everything better. I was entertaining this and other childish fantasies, as I needed my skin hoping to work the headache away with brute force, a body and mind. But that wasn't working, unsurprisingly, as this was no imagined threat and no passing scare either, such as a wolf or a bear. As I had said, I had run across wildlife already, and that fear always went away once the threat was out of sight, and it was certainly a distant thought once I was safely inside. But this, it wasn't a wolf or a bear, wasn't even a person, and those could be frightening enough too. We had dealt with a fair few delinquent adolescents during the short time that I had been working as a ranger. This wasn't anything natural as far as I could tell, or as far as my worrying mind was telling me. And that begged the question. What is it? I whispered. What is the Rook? Graham sighed and wandered off to look out the window, while Abigail came and sat on the sofa perpendicular to me, offering me a soft smile. Oh, it's gone now, Richard. You don't have to worry. We'll just wait here the rest of the evening, and everything will be, it'll be okay. She didn't sound so sure. And besides, she had avoided my question. What is the rook, Abigail? I asked, trying to steady my voice so as to convince her that I could be trusted with the truth, that I wouldn't entirely break apart upon learning one more horror on top of the one already bubbling in my brain, the feeling that I had looked upon something which to my mind's eye shouldn't exist. I had known that much just by staring at the shadow. It hadn't been a shadow at all. It had been, well, I didn't know, and I wasn't sure Abigail was going to tell me. But she did, and it started with her own story. I started here as the pandemic was starting to, well, become less of a thing. I mean it was still a thing, but they were talking about opening up this place to the public again. So they were recruiting. And if you think you've started at a bad time now, Richard, then let me tell you, it ain't a thing on what the park was like back then. Ghostly these woods were. Just Graham and me walk an empty pass, getting things ready to open back up to the public. What I didn't understand back then was Harry's reluctance to let the public back. He kept fighting the park service on it every step of the way. I kept asking Graham about it and he told me it was because he was scared of the ruck. The two of them saw themselves as gatekeepers, not custodians of the forest as such, but custodians of the people. Keeping them safe from the dark thing that walked this land. And the pandemic had helped them in a way. No people around, no threat. And Graham told me that I should be hopeful that we continue holding off, that we don't start letting people back in at any time, because the ruck had been quiet for the past year or so. It would get loud again once we opened the gates, because it always sensed humans. Of course, I didn't believe in the ruck back then. Like you, Richard, I followed the no whistling rule, but I didn't believe a boogeyman would come get me if I were to slip up one night. I knew that folks in the town talked about seeing things. Dogmen, Bigfoot, Wendigos. I had heard all sorts and I would nod politely, but I had never seen a darn thing myself, not in my thirty-something years on God's Greenland. I always thought that if there were anything unearthly on earth, I surely would have seen it by then. I wasn't old, but I had been around long enough. But now I know there are things that were custom to the dark. They don't make a habit of being seen. And sometimes it helps me to think of them as predators, because I surely know the rook ain't the only dark thing out in the forest. But they ain't predators. Predatory behavior is for animals. They use dark things. They take for another reason. They don't feed on us. They don't derive any pleasure from it for as far as I can tell. I don't know what it is that drives them. All I know is they take and everybody they take meets the most horrible end that you can imagine. It was about a month of working by Graham's side when Harry was overruled by the Park Service and the people started trickling in again. That I learned all these lessons. That I finally saw the rook for myself. Graham and I were walking the same stretch of path as you and I walked this evening, Richard, up through the forest, cutting all the way to the mountain from my station. It's a popular trail. Graham interjected to Say as he looked out the window and jumped skittishly from foot to foot. It's the trail where I saw that girl earlier. Abigail lifted a hand. Okay, Graham will. We'll sort that out later. We don't know that she's missing. She might have gone home. I don't think so. He replied ominously. I've got the same feeling that I always get. And it ain't got a thing to do with the blood or the marks on the tree. We see plenty of that from animals. No, this is something else. This is the feeling that nods up my stomach every time that, that thing strikes. Every time that thing takes a person, there's an emptiness in the air. Like the rook has stolen a soul from existence itself. Like it's plucked something from reality in a way that it shouldn't have. Abigail sighed and continued, Anyway, Richard, where was I? The trail, I said, hardly wanting her to continue. Right, she said, and I could tell by her wet eyes and the strain in her voice that she hardly wanted to continue either. The trail, well, that night I sensed a difference in Graham. He was behaving sort of like he's behaving tonight. All jittery and jumpy, like he sensed something in the air. And that's something that I would come to notice. It's something that you'll come to notice in time too, Richard. I shook my head. You're off your rocker. I ain't working a day here ever again. I'm getting out of this town and never looking back. That's what I said too. But just, but just let me finish, Richard, okay? Let me finish and then you'll see and maybe you'll have an easier time of coming to terms than all that I did. I'm trying to make it easier on you, trying to make it easier than Graham made it for me. Hey, Graham said, turning to fur was brow at her. Don't put all this on me, girl. I ain't putting all of it on you, she said. Not the rook and you are the way you are. Harry is the way that he is. But you didn't exactly prepare me either of you. You said not to whistle in the dark. You said the rook would get me. It sounded like a bedtime story for kids. What was I supposed to think? Well, what were we supposed to tell you? I asked Graham with a scoff. What story could we possibly have told you about the rook that would have made you believe? You could have at the very least told me about the missing people. She shot back. He went quiet. Yeah, Abigail said sniffling. Could have told me about them. I told Richard. I nodded. I mean, sure, you told me people had gone missing over the years. It didn't exactly make me believe in whatever the rook is. I don't think anything would have made me believe in it other than seeing it with my own two eyes, like I did tonight. I couldn't believe that I was speaking in Graham's favor. And by the look in his saucer eyes, he could hardly believe it either. But I thought it only fair to point out that there was no right way to initiate anybody into the role of park ranger, because an impossibility was stalking the forest, and Abigail and I would have always been skeptics about it before seeing it for ourselves. Of course, I didn't know whether Graham's was any better. The tale of the rook did certainly sound made up, and I would have laughed in his face if he or Harry had told me that was why we shouldn't whistle after dark. But still, Graham looked for the first time in the months that I had been working alongside him, happy with me. I didn't want to rock the boat by adding anything negative and so I left it, and I let him turn back to the window. Abigail shrugged. I see your point, I guess there was no way to prepare you for this, but I did try to warn you that you might want to turn your back on this place, go somewhere else, find a job in nature that wouldn't come with this darkness. Well, I've learned my lesson now, I said. I'll leave in the morning and you'll never see me again. No you won't, said Abigail. Like I said, there's more to the story. I saw the rook right. He heard me talking to Graham about it before. You know that it was because I scraped the lid of the water bottle, made a shrill noise and I drew it out of hiding. That's just your opinion. Interjected Graham. I told you it's only whistling that brings it out. I think it found us by chance. By rotten chance. That can happen sometimes. It happened to us tonight. Richard just saw it out the window. Ain't like any of us whistled, is it? Abigail nodded. You've never understood this, Graham, I felt something change in me when I made that noise. Like the shrillness of the sound of the scraping lead. It went right through my very core, like it tethered me to something. Graham snorted. Tethered. Yeah, tethered. Abigail insisted. And then the rook appeared and well, you saved me, Graham. You saved the pair of us by getting us up to the watchtower. It was terrifying, Richard. We made our way up the metal treads, spiraling around the tower, and when I looked down, I saw it. That silhouette that you saw. I saw it gushing up and around the stairwell, pursuing us and gaining on us. I thought it would have us, but then, about fifty feet up, it just stopped. It never climbs up all the way, Graham said. In all my years, I've always found that the best way to escape it, if you really find yourself stuck, is to get up high. I don't know whether it's scared or what. I think it's what happens once it goes past the top of the treeline, past the canopy of leaves that make up the roof of the forest. I think it's trapped here and that's a good thing. Means that we can always get away from it if we get out of the forest, you know. It's why we're not safe in the station right now. I think we ought to make a run for the tower. Harry will be up there. He'll probably be expecting us if he's sensed the rook too, an odd wager that he has. He might be getting old, but it's like you said, Abigail. Once you've been influenced by this thing, you get a nose for it. I was frowning by this point, because Graham was ignoring the tears in Abigail's eyes, and he was ignoring, it seemed, the most important part of what she had said. Tethered, I said. What did you mean by that? She just means that it changes you, said Graham. That is not what I mean, she said. That's what you and Harry mean, because you've never been foolish enough to draw it to you with a whistling sound. I have, by accident, of course, but still. I made the sound, and it drew to me. Why do you think that local tribe who taught Harry everything that he knows always warned him not to whistle in particular? They said that he would run into the rug, and there was no avoiding that. But they told me no whistling, no whistling again and again. They gave him that advice. Graham sighed. I don't know, Abigail, but I think all this tethering business is in your head. I don't, because I tried to leave. After that shift in the morning, I tried to leave town. I passed out and I crashed my car into a tree. You were still in shock from the events of the night before, Graham said. That was all. You got overwhelmed, passed out, and crashed your car. Abigail shook her head, eyeing me with tears, and I finally understood why. No, it wouldn't let me leave. I saw the rook that day. You and Harry don't believe me, but I did. From the tree line of the forest, near the border at the edge of town where I crashed, it watched me from the dark with eyes that looked like mine, Graham. It was like a copy of me was standing there in the dark, hiding from the sunlight and watching. It ain't like any description of the rook that I've ever heard, said Graham. It's just a shadow and it stalks people at night, not during the day. I know what I saw. Abigail said, and I was starting to cry now, too, as I pieced together why she was telling me this. And I tried again once I was out of the hospital. I wasn't going to be foolish enough to try driving out again, so I decided to get somebody else to take me out there. I tried to get that taxi driver to take me out of town and he stopped. He stopped driving right before the border and started crying. He told me to get out of the car or it would get him. He wouldn't explain. He didn't need to explain. Because I understand. I felt the pang of pain in my head and I was close to passing out again myself. I've tried other times over the years, plenty of times. I always feel sick, sometimes I black out. And plenty of times if I search the treeline, I'll see it there. The rug, wearing my face atop its black form. And Graham shook his head. For a man who so staunchly believed in a creature beyond worldly explanation, he certainly seems strongly in denial, set in his firm and unyielding beliefs. No, that's just, you didn't even whistle, Abigail. I know that's what the tribe told Harry all those years ago, but I don't think it's just whistling that puts a person in danger. She whispered as I tried to blink away my tears and she eyed me with pity. I think it's a certain, a certain frequency, maybe a certain range of frequencies, a certain stillness that ties a person to this thing, and then it takes a piece of them, even if it doesn't manage to kill them, and make them disappear like all the others. It steals a piece of them and keeps them trapped in this forest, in this town, in this patch of land. It keeps us here unable to escape, probably hoping that it will one day catch us and make us vanish like all of its other victims. Graham shook his head and looked at me. It's all hogwash, Richard, the rest of it is true. There is a creature beyond explanation. It's a dark thing and it makes people go away. That much is true, but everything else is just nonsense. Then why haven't you or Harry ever tried? Asked Abigail, why haven't either of you ever tried to drive me out of town? Graham's eyes were tearing up a little themselves. There was that denial again. Oh, because it's because we'd be indulging you, because it's okay. It's okay, Graham. You don't have to pretend, because Richard knows too now, don't you? I nodded, Graham frowned. What is she talking about? I barely managed to get my voice out. I think that I've unwittingly tethered myself to the rook too. I feel everything Abigail is describing. And Graham shook his head. Hey, that's understandable, kid. It's all normal. You've seen a creature that shouldn't exist. Of course you're going to feel nauseated, scared, and trapped. I shook my head. It's more than that. I started to sob, and Abigail came over to my chair, kneeling before me, and putting her hands atop mine, on my knees. I made the same mistake as Abigail. When I radioed her to tell her about the blood and the marks on the tree, the radio went haywire. Yeah, well, it's an old piece of junk, so what? asked Graham. So, it made a sound, a high-pitched sound. Heaven's above, Graham said, shaking his head and wiping his eyes. I knew that he believed. Deep down, he just didn't want to believe, because that would make him feel culpable, I suppose, for what had happened to Abigail, what happened to me. He and Harriet hired us, after all. They had brought us into this world, into this mess. We'll survive, Abigail promised me when I managed to blink out some of my tears and focus on her face again. I've done it for years, and you will, too. But what kind of life is it? I asked. You live in constant terror, trapped in a town in a forest, feeling forever followed. Haunted by a thing that threatens to make you disappear. How do you live like that? She sniffled. With great difficulty in one day after another, like wading through water. I don't want us to start thinking like this, Graham said. But you believe it deep down, don't you? I asked. He shook his head. I don't know what I... And Graham was interrupted by rapping on the door. Three knocks evenly spaced out, as if there were one for each of us. We all turned slowly to the wooden front door, illuminated by the sickly orange glow of the old light bulb swinging from the ceiling overhead. I don't know how long we waited there with bated breath before Abigail finally said something. Who's there? She called out timidly. There came no reply. I don't know whether that was better or worse. I had expected some inhuman growl, perhaps or the shrill sound of whistling. I thought that silence was a blessing. In that way, but it wasn't. It only left me with more terrifying unknowns to unpack. And I assumed, as I sat there in the armchair, Abigail's hands to the top of mine as she knelt on the floor before me, that all three of us were in agreement. Everybody must remain still, and nobody must do a thing. Graham didn't seem to be on the same page. The older man began walking across the station, floorboards creaking under his thick boots as he went. Don't do it, I begged. Don't do it, Graham. But his mind was made up. He wrapped his fingers around the handle, flicked off the lock, and pulled the door inward. First came a gust of wind. I gasped, thinking it to be the ruck, the shadow itself, pouring into the ranger station. But it was just that, wind. And I had expected in some form of the creature's trickery, as Graham had put it, for there to be nothing and nobody standing in the dirt outside the station. For the very opening of the door to simply be a means of the ruck getting a good look at us, and maybe slipping undetected over our threshold. Using its nightmarishly unknown ways to make Abigail and I disappear. Leaving Graham alone and screaming into the night. But there was someone there. A young woman. And by the gasp that Graham let out, I knew it was the young hiker that he had seen earlier that day. The one who had gone missing. Graham. I started as the man stepped aside to let the woman in. Don't. She stepped gingerly across the threshold looking weak and vulnerable. But this was all an illusion. And as she came into the ranger station striding slowly, it felt as if time itself had slowed. It had almost come to a stall entirely. I watched tearfully as she passed Graham in that slow motion state and let out a pained yelp. The man's skin sagged as she walked past him. It sagged like a wilting flower and then began to come off his bones and flanks. And he was not but skeletal remains crumpling to the ground in a matter of moments. Before the young hiker had even placed a second foot into the station. And when those bones hit the ground, they became ash. Before being swept up with the wind and carried out the front door. Disappearing with all the others who had been lost to the woods over the years. I lept to my feet dragging Abigail up with me. And the two of us ran, screaming as we went, but as fast as we moved, it all felt unthinkably slow. Time still felt blurred. It took what felt like an eternity to reach the back door leading out of the station, but when we did, a crossing the threshold back into the forest, the cold air of the forest and sound of wildlife greeted us. Time seemed to steady itself, and all seemed ordinary outside. I had expected the soundness of wild animals cowering in fear from the rug, but maybe they were at peace with it, this thing stealing people away from the world. Abigail slammed the back door behind us after ventilating. What? What? She didn't manage any more than that word repeated. Come on, the watchtower. She didn't respond with words or her eyes. She was far away in spirit, and I realized that was what she needed to do to survive in that moment. All I wanted from her was for her to move her feet, and I was thankful when she did, letting me lead her through the park, between the trees and along trails, and towards Harry's watchtower in the near distance. We ran for a mile, maybe more, before the steel monolith came into view. I didn't look over my shoulder not because I was afraid of slowing down, but because I was afraid that I would turn to find the rook and not behind us at all. I had this horrible feeling, I'd call it that tether that Abigail had talked about, binding us to the rook and perhaps revealing to us as well as to it, how far away we were from the thing at any one time. I had this feeling anyway that the creature was not behind us, but perhaps alongside us or in front. I had a feeling that it did not bend to the laws of nature as we did, because it did not abide by the world and its rules. It was of somewhere else, a place to which Gram's ashes had perhaps floated. And I suddenly realized why Abigail kept fighting each and every day, why she had done so for many years. As long and painful as her life might be, the alternative was worse, ending up where the Rook took people. Was it some hellscape of eternal torture? Something beyond human comprehension? I didn't know, and I didn't want to know. We pushed into the clearing surrounding Harry's watchtower, and that was when I finally dared to turn and look back at the tree line. I let out a yelp of horror. A silhouette shaped vaguely like a person, but one far too tall with standing between two tall fir trees, and its face which had been black and formless when I had seen the thing from the comfort and false security of the ranger station was now a blurry peach color, and as I looked a few moments longer, and the details of a face came into view. My face. I was looking at myself. I did not wear a smile or a frown or any expression at all. It was like a wax copy worn by a thing that didn't have a framework to understand such thing as smiles or frowns or any human thing. It just wore us like finery. My face was simply another for its collection. I pushed Abigail up the stairs in front of me as the rook moved out from the tree line and began to cross the clearing towards us. Move, please Abigail. She grunted as stumbling up the stairs, unknocking knees that betrayed her. I knew she wanted to survive, but her body was failing her in light of what we had seen in the ranger station. So I did most of the surviving for us. I pushed her up, put my hands on her back to propel her any time she slowed, and I reminded her to keep running. She picked up a bit of speed and we started to ascend the tower two steps at a time. And as the top of the trees came into view, I thought of Graham's reminder that the rook was trapped by the forest on all sides. I started to smile. This was it, and we were about to be free. And given that I'm here to tell the tale, you know this to be so. So I turned on the steps once we had passed the top of the forest, and I let out a scream as I fell on my back, fell upwards rather than downwards thankfully. The silhouette was standing there lit by the moon, watching me with my lifeless and unmoving face atop its black shadow we had. It just stood and watched, unable to move beyond that imaginary upper threshold of its wooded cage. And as it looked at me without speaking or moving, I realized that I was now bound to that cage too, tethered to the rook much like Abigail. Richard, she moaned from farther up the stairs. I got to my feet and I followed her. We got to Harry's door and the man gave us solemn looks as he let us in. What are you doing here so late? I tried to radio Graham that the rook was wandering nearby. Where, where is Graham? Things have been different for me since that day. I sense that things have been different for Harry and Abigail too. I don't think they've ever seen death before. They've known a people going missing, but they've never directly known a person who went missing. And Abigail had certainly never seen it. I don't think either of us will ever forget watching Graham's body turn to nothing before our very eyes. I think of it during my waking hours at all times. And it serves as a stark reminder. A reminder of what the rook will do to Abigail and me, should it ever reel in our tethers.