3 Outdoor Horror Stories That Will Make You Fear the Dark

I've posted a shorter version of this before, but I left a lot out. At the time, I could barely talk about what happened after we packed up our tent. I kept stopping to reread what I'd written, and then I'd delete most of it, because I didn't want to spend the rest of the day thinking about it. It's been four years now. My girlfriend from that trip is my wife, and she read through this before I posted it. There are a couple of things she remembers more clearly than I do. There are also things I wish neither of us remembered. We camped for the night in Stanislaus National Forest, near big trees in California. I don't mean inside the state park or at one of the actual campgrounds. We'd driven farther out and turned onto a dirt forest road, then followed it uphill until we found somewhere to pull over. We were only about 15 minutes off the main road. That was something I kept telling myself later. 15 minutes didn't sound remote. It sounded like we could leave whenever we felt like it. I'd been camping probably 50 times by then, but almost always with a larger group or at a dedicated campsite. My girlfriend, Alissa, had been a handful of times. We'd both had a miserable couple of weeks at work, and the whole idea was to spend one night somewhere quiet. No reservations, no neighbors, nothing planned for the following morning. It was dinner, a tent, and the drive home. We got there early in the afternoon. The road climbed in long bends, doubling back across the same hillside. On one of the lower bends, we passed an old logging spur that dropped out of sight through the trees. Farther up, we found our clearing. It sat a little above the road at the top of a bank, with enough room for the car and a tent. He had clearly camped there before, although there wasn't any trash or anything that suggested anyone had used it recently. We drove a little farther to see what else was around, but a locked gate blocked the road about a quarter mile beyond the clearing. There was a broad turnout on our side of the gate, with several pickups parked along its edge. We turned around and went back. I parked facing out. I remember being pleased with myself for doing that, because I normally backed into a branch, or had to turn around six times when we left somewhere. The front of the car was maybe 20 feet from the road. We put the tent another 20 feet behind it, where the ground was mostly level. One side of the clearing dropped away into the woods. The other side ran uphill through thick brush. Behind the tent was a fallen tree with most of the bark gone, and behind that was a shallow dip full of dead branches. Standing up, you could see over the fallen tree. Sitting on the ground, you couldn't see much of anything past it. That dip is something I need to explain, because when I told people afterward that I'd shown a flashlight around and hadn't seen anyone, some of them acted like that settled it. There were places within a few yards of our tent, where a person could have been completely out of sight. I hadn't chosen a clearing I could see all the way around. I'd chosen a flat place, where the tent wouldn't hurt my back. We walked around a little before unpacking. Alyssa found an old, mostly overgrown track, leading away from the far side of the clearing. It went downhill at an angle, wide enough that a truck must have used it years earlier. We followed it for a few minutes until we came to a wash out. Beyond that, we could see part of a dirt road through the trees below us. I thought it was the lower bend we'd driven along on the way up. There was a pale rock sticking out of the bank beside it that I'd noticed from the car. We went back and forgot about it. For the next few hours, everything was exactly what we'd come out there for. We unpacked. I struggled with a tent pole that wasn't actually stuck. I was just putting it together wrong. Alyssa sat on the cooler and made fun of me. We ate chips before dinner because we'd both skipped lunch. Maybe four vehicles passed during the afternoon. They were pickups, mostly, with men in hunting clothes inside. I assumed they were hunters leaving the forest. One driver lifted a hand. Another didn't even look toward us. The last vehicle was a grey pickup with a black rack over the bed. It went by around the time I started cooking. There were two men inside. The passenger wore an orange cap, and I noticed him because he turned his whole upper body to look back at the clearing after they'd passed it. I gave him a little wave. He didn't wave back. I didn't take that as a warning. People look at other people's campsites. I'd been doing it all afternoon. The pickup continued downhill. I heard its engine for a while, then couldn't hear it anymore. We cooked dinner on a little propane stove and drank a couple of beers. By seven, the sun had mostly set and the clearing was getting dark. I felt a little strange about how isolated we were, although I didn't say anything. In a campground, even when you can't see the next site, you usually hear somebody doing something. Out there, once we'd finished cleaning up, there wasn't much sound at all. We hung a bear bag with the food and the things that smelled like food, then put the cooler and the rest of our cooking stuff in the car. I had a can of bear spray I'd brought on other trips and never used. I put it just inside the tent, along with a flashlight, my phone, and the car keys. I'm mentioning the beers and what we did next, because I mentioned them the first time I told this story, and people immediately decided we'd imagine the whole thing. We shared a joint while lying on a blanket looking at the stars. Neither of us was falling over or seeing things. Still, yes, we'd smoked. And that gave both of us an excuse to doubt ourselves later, when doubting ourselves was about the worst thing we could have done. By the time we got into the tent, I felt good. I wasn't thinking about the road or the men who'd passed us. My phone had no service, which I'd expected. I checked the time, set it beside my shoes, and put the flashlight where I could find it. I'm tall, but the tent was high enough that I could sit up without hitting my head. We were sitting near the middle, talking in the dark. The rainfly was flung over the roof without being clipped down. It completely covered the uphill side and hung partway over the other side. We'd left it that way because it was dry, and we wanted some air. Through the exposed mesh, we could see the trunks in front of us, and a little patch of moonlit ground. I had been reading a lot of creepy stuff on Reddit and started telling Alyssa about three kings. If you haven't heard of it, the version I'd read involved sitting in a dark room in the middle of the night with a candle in mirrors and supposedly seeing or speaking to something. I wasn't describing it accurately enough for either of us to try it. I was just enjoying making her uncomfortable. She kept telling me to stop while also asking what happened next. We'd been talking for at least an hour. The woods were dead still. There was no wind moving through the mesh. No brush moving outside. Every so often, I could hear the fabric of Alyssa's sleeping bag when she shifted her legs. I paused because I couldn't remember part of the story. That was when the rainfly began to move. At first, all I noticed was a narrow strip of mesh appearing above my head. I thought the fabric had slipped because one of us had bumped the tent. When the strip got wider, the fly was moving uphill toward the covered side, directly behind our backs. It wasn't falling in a quick slide. It moved a few inches, stopped, and moved again. Alyssa put her hand on my knee. We both turned, although there wasn't anything to see through the side still covered by the fly. The nylon made this faint dragging sound against the tent poles. I remember it more clearly than I remember things people said to me the following morning. Slow friction, a brief pause, then more of it. The loose edge on the open side crept up over the mesh. I stopped breathing. It kept going until the last of the fabric passed over the highest pole. Then it disappeared down the back of the tent. There was no breeze afterward. Nothing moved around us. The mesh in front of my face was perfectly still. I'd like to tell you I grabbed the spray and got us out of there. I didn't. I sat with one hand on the floor, trying to make myself reach the flashlight. Alyssa's fingers were digging into my knee. We stayed like that for maybe ten seconds, which felt much longer. When I finally switched on the light, the beam went across the mesh so brightly that I couldn't see beyond it. I had to lean forward and hold it close to the fabric. The fly was on the ground behind us. There wasn't anyone standing over it. I swept the light from side to side. Fall in tree. Brush. The pale underside of a broken branch. Nothing moving. Alyssa. asked if I could see anything, and I said no. That answer made both of us feel better for about three seconds. Then I realized that we still had to decide what to do. I unzipped the door, put my shoes on, and crawled out with the flashlight. I didn't take the spray. I don't have an explanation for that. I could probably write an entire second post listing the things I should have done differently. The fly had come to rest between the tent and the fallen tree. Part of it lay over a thick, exposed root. I picked it up and felt along the edge, as though there might be something stuck to it that explained what had happened. It was just fabric. I walked around the tent once. I looked under the car and shone the light at the road. I stood there listening until Alyssa asked me to come back. I told her the fly must have been unbalanced. The heavier side had gradually pulled the rest of it over the poles. Maybe we'd loosened it by moving around. I had to explain the stopping and starting to myself, too. Fabric catching on the pole, then letting go. That sounded possible. I said it confidently enough that she nodded. What I didn't tell her was that, when I'd lifted the fly off the root, one corner had been tucked underneath the fallen tree, not far, just a few inches, enough that I had to pull it free. I decided it had landed that way. I put it back on the tent and clipped down all four corners. Then I got inside, zipped the door shut, and placed the bear spray against my thigh. Neither of us wanted another story. We talked about leaving. I want to be clear about that. Alyssa asked whether we should get in the car, and I said we could if she wanted. Then she asked whether I honestly thought somebody had pulled it off. I said I didn't know. That was the closest either of us came to admitting what we'd both seen. The dirt road was narrow in places, with some sharp turns, and an exposed edge. I'd had the beers and smoked. Neither of us liked the idea of driving it in the dark, unless there was an actual reason, too. We could have slept in the car without driving anywhere, of course. That's obvious now. At the time, I thought that if the fabric had just slipped, we'd feel ridiculous taking everything apart over it. I didn't want to be scared of an empty piece of ground. I especially didn't want her to know how scared I was. So we stayed. I kept the flashlight on for a while. We lay on top of our sleeping bags, facing the door, and talked about going somewhere for breakfast on the way home. Eventually, the normal conversation started helping. Alyssa complained about the little ridge under her hip. I offered to trade sides. She said my side was worse. It wasn't comfortable, but it was familiar. Two people trying to sleep in a cheap tent. I switched the light off. For a long time I could hear her breathing without being sure she was asleep. Once she moved her foot and pushed the tent fabric against the fly. The sound made my whole body tense. Nothing happened. At some point, I did sleep. I don't know how long I was out, but when I woke, my phone set a little after two, I didn't know what had woken me. I was on my back, one arm numb underneath my head. The rainfly was still there. I lay listening. Alyssa was facing away from me. I could see very little, just the lighter patch where the mesh door would be if I sat up. Then I heard a small metallic sound outside. It was brief enough that I immediately wondered whether I'd heard it at all. It could have been a zipper. It could have been something settling in the pile of gear we'd left beside the tent. There was a folding chair outside with a loose metal pin that made a similar sound when you moved it. I waited for something else. Nothing came. I was cold, and I badly needed to pee. But the thought of unzipping the door made me feel sick. I stayed where I was. After a while I checked the time again. Nine minutes had passed. I remember that because I was so relieved. Surely if there were somebody right outside, something would have happened in 9 minutes. That's the kind of reasoning I was doing. Eventually I rolled onto my side and tried to sleep again. The next thing I remember clearly is daylight through the tent. Alyssa was already sitting up. Her shoes were in her lap, and she was pulling a sock over one foot. I asked how she'd slept. She said badly, then asked the same thing. I said fine. We both knew I was lying. The clearing looked ordinary when we got out. The car was where we'd left it. The road was empty. Sunlight was reaching the trees across from us. Although our part of the hill was still cool. I unclip the fly and spread it over the car to dry off a little moisture. Alyssa went to get the food bag down. We weren't going to cook anything. We decided on granola bars and coffee once we got back to the main road. I started pulling the tent stakes. One of the folding chairs had been moved. Not across the clearing or anything dramatic. The chair I'd used at dinner was now facing the tent instead of the place where we'd cooked. It was also closer to the fallen tree. I stood there looking at it, trying to remember whether I'd moved it while checking around the night before. Alyssa noticed me looking and asked what was wrong. I said nothing. Then she asked whether I'd gotten out of the tent during the night. I turned around. She was holding the food bag against her chest. She hadn't opened it. I told her I hadn't. She said she'd woken up once and thought I was outside. She'd heard something near the chair, then a person clearing their throat. I asked why she hadn't woken me, because she'd thought it was me. She hadn't reached over to check. She'd been half asleep. She'd heard a noise she associated with me, and she'd gone back to sleep. I'd been right beside her the whole time. We didn't argue about whether the noise could have been an animal. We didn't discuss the rainfly. I told her to put the food in the car. After that, we moved faster. The tent was the last large thing left. I was on my knees folding it while Alyssa carried the remaining odds and ends to the car. She was about 30 feet in front of me near the passenger side. I kept looking over my shoulder. It was sunny by then. I could see between the trees. I could see the brush on the uphill side and the fallen trunk behind me. I still had that awful feeling that I was bending over while someone stood just out of view. Then I heard two hard thuds from behind me. There were about two seconds between them. Both were loud, with a solid wooden sound. The kind an axe makes when it hits a tree. They came from somewhere uphill, close enough that I thought I should be able to see the person making them. Alyssa stood straight up. I turned so fast I put my hand down on the tent and nearly fell over. There wasn't anyone there. We stayed still. I had one knee on the ground and one foot under me, ready to stand. The woods went completely quiet again. Alyssa said, "We're leaving." I agreed before she finished saying it. I didn't bother with the tent bag. I folded the whole thing over my forearms and carried it to the car. Poles hanging crookedly out of the fabric. We shoved the chairs in on top. I put the bear spray in the pocket of my door because I didn't want it buried under everything else. I remember locking the doors the moment we were both inside. For a few seconds, we just sat there. Then I started the engine. Backing out wasn't necessary. All I had to do was pull forward, turn downhill, and follow the road we'd driven in on. I did it too quickly and scraped the bottom of the car coming off the bank. Neither of us cared. At the first bend, Alyssa let out a long breath. She put her hand over mine on the gear shift and held it there. I could feel how cold her fingers were. I told her we were going to get breakfast at the first place we saw. She said she wanted a place with a lot of people. What was the first time I'd almost laughed since the rainfly came off? We drove for a few minutes. The road was rough enough that I couldn't go much faster than a person on a bicycle, but I was starting to feel better. Trees went by. Sunlight came through the windshield. Nothing was following us. Then we came around a bend and found a log across the road. It wasn't a whole tree that had just fallen. Both ends had been cut, and the bark was rubbed off one side. It was a length of trunk, thick enough that we couldn't drive over it, lying at an angle across both tire tracks. On the downhill side of the road was a steep bank. On the uphill side was a cut slope with roots sticking out. There wasn't room to go around. I stopped about two car length short of it. A man stepped out from beside the uphill bank. He was wearing a faded brown workshop over a white t-shirt. His hair was short and gray at the sides, and he had a broad sunburned face. He looked irritated, which for a second was reassuring. Somebody else was having an ordinary problem with a blocked road. He lifted a hand and walked toward my window. I lowered it a couple of inches. He said the log hadn't been there earlier. I said we'd driven past yesterday and hadn't seen it either. He looked into the back of our car. The tent and the chairs were piled high enough that there wasn't much else to see. Then he asked me to get out and help him move it. I nearly did. My hand was already on the door handle when Alyssa squeezed my arm. She was staring past me at the man. He'd put his fingers over the top of my window, hooking them down into the gap. There wasn't any reason to do that. He could hear me just fine. I told him I'd rather stay in the car. He smiled a little, but it didn't make his face look friendlier. "It's only wood," he said. "I said I understood that. I asked if he had a vehicle nearby. He looked back up the road. I checked my driver's side mirror. There was a grey pickup behind us. I hadn't heard it arrive. Maybe the engine in our car had covered the sound. Maybe it had been tucked into the wide spot we'd just passed, and I'd been looking toward the log. All I knew was that it was now stopped at an angle across the road, with a black rack over the bed. The driver's door opened. A man in an orange cap got out. I recognized the cap before I recognized anything else. The man at my window saw me looking in the mirror. He moved his hand farther through the gap. I told him to take it out. He didn't. He looked across me at Alyssa instead. You two get any sleep up there. I can't describe how completely that changed his face for me. He still looked like somebody you might see buying hardware on a Saturday morning. But I suddenly couldn't look away from his hand. The nails were dirty. There was a pale nick across one knuckle. His fingertips were inside our car. Alyssa said, "Put the window up. I pressed the switch. He jerked his hand out just before the glass closed. For the first time, his smile disappeared. He tried the door handle. I put the car in reverse. Alyssa was already on her phone, trying to call for help. She held it up near the windshield, then lowered it, and tried again. I didn't ask whether it was working. I could see from her face that it wasn't. The pickup was behind us and the log was in front. I looked at the bank, then at the space beside the log, trying to find somewhere a car could fit. There wasn't. The man in the orange cap walked toward the passenger side. He was younger than the other man, maybe in his 30s, with a narrow face and a patchy beard. He carried a shorthandled axe down against his leg. I could see the whole thing. There was no reason to tell myself it was anything else. He stopped beside Alyssa's window and bent to look at her. She put the phone in her lap. The older man struck my window with his palm. I flinched so hard my foot came off the brake, and the car rolled back a few inches. He said something about shutting the engine off. I pressed the brake again. I remember thinking that if I did exactly what he said, maybe he'd stop getting angry. That thought scares me now. I was sitting in a locked, running car, and part of me wanted to turn it off because a stranger had told me to. Alyssa leaned across the console and said my name. She wasn't looking at either of them. She was looking at the mirror. The pickup had stopped crookedly. Its front end was close to the drop on one side, but there was a gap behind its bed on the other. Back there, the bank was lower than the steep cut beside the log. A strip of loose soil ran between it and the truck's rear corner. It wasn't wide enough for me to feel sure the car could get through. It was the only opening I could see. I told Alyssa to hold on. Then the younger man raised the axe. He didn't swing at her window. He hit the small rear window behind her, and the glass broke into the back seat. Alyssa ducked. I pushed the accelerator down. The car shot backward. The older man grabbed at the door, then stumbled away from it. I used my side mirror to aim the back of the car toward the gap, then looked over my shoulder. Most of the rear window was blocked by our camping gear. He hit something on the bank, the rear of the car jumped, and the whole body leaned sideways. For a moment, I thought we were going over. Then there was a long, horrible scraping sound down Alyssa's side. The pickup shook in the mirror. Her side mirror folded against the glass and broke. I kept my foot down. The car got through. I was still going backward too fast, with the road bending behind us. Alyssa twisted around in her seat and shoved the tent out of the way so I could see. I slowed enough to make the bend. The front tires slid toward the edge, caught, and straightened. I don't know how much of that was anything I did correctly. A lot of it was luck. We reached the wider patch where I think the pickup had been waiting. I stopped, turned as sharply as I could, pulled forward, backed up once, and finally got the car facing uphill. The younger man came around the bend behind us while I was still turning. He was running. I drove away before he'd made it halfway to us. Alyssa started saying that we couldn't go up there. I knew what she meant. The gate we'd found the previous afternoon was still up ahead. There wasn't a way through that we'd seen. We were heading back toward the clearing because it was the only place we could go, without getting out of the car in front of those men. I told her about the old track. For a second, she didn't understand. Then she said, "The road below us." I nodded. We couldn't get the car down it. We'd seen the wash out. We'd have to leave the car and go on foot. I hated the idea. I hated it so much I almost kept driving toward the gate, hoping there would be another turn we hadn't noticed. Then Alyssa looked back and said she could hear the pickup. I pulled into the clearing. It was wrong seeing that place again. The flat spot where the tent had been was still a little darker than the ground around it. There were two shallow marks where the cooler had sat. Not long before, I'd been telling myself we were having a normal morning. I stopped beside the spot where the tent had been, as far from the entrance as the car could go. I shut off the engine and pulled out the keys. We took almost nothing. I grabbed the spray out of the door and put my phone and keys in my pockets. Alyssa had her phone. She reached into the back for her jacket, saw the glass on it, and left it. With our engine off we could hear the pickup coming uphill. We got out and ran for the old track. I wanted to slam my door because leaving it open felt wrong. I actually went back half a step to do it before Alyssa pulled my arm. She remembers that part better than I do. Apparently, I said I didn't want them taking the car. They'd just broken a window with an axe and I was worried about leaving the door open. We went down through the brush, trying to stay on the old tire ruts. The ground was loose and I kept sliding in the dry needles. I held the can of spray so tightly that my hand started hurting. Alyssa was ahead of me. She remembered the track more clearly than I did. We reached the wash out. It was a gouge across the old road, maybe 6 feet wide, with a steep dirt edge on our side. Yesterday we'd stood there for a minute and turned around. Now there was a truck stopping in the clearing above us. I helped Alyssa lower herself down, then followed. My heel went out from under me, and I landed hard on one knee. The pain was sharp enough that I couldn't stand immediately. She took hold of my wrist and pulled until I got my other leg underneath me. Move us an engine shut off. A man's voice called something I couldn't understand. We climbed the far edge. My knee worked, but it hurt every time I bent it. I wanted to sit down and look at it. I also wanted to be a mile away from that place. The old track curved left beyond the wash out, moving across the hill toward the lower road. We could see the pale rock now. We'd been right about where it went. The old track cut across the inside of the road's bends. It would bring us out on the lower stretch, below the log that had blocked our car. That should have made me feel better. Instead I noticed how much open ground lay between us and it. There were stretches where the old track had almost disappeared. Then long gaps between trunks, where anyone looking down from above could see us moving. Alyssa stopped. She was looking to our right. I followed her gaze and saw the orange cap between two trees. The younger man wasn't on the old track. He'd come straight down the slope from the clearing while we'd gone around to the wash out. He was below us now, standing near the route we'd have to take to reach the road. He hadn't seen us yet. At least he wasn't looking directly at us. Alyssa pulled me down behind the raised root base of a fallen tree. There was just enough room for us to crouch between the roots and a thick growth of brush. I put a hand over my mouth because I couldn't get my breathing quiet. The man in the cap turned his head uphill. He lifted the axe and struck a dead trunk beside him. Two blows. A short pause between them. The same sound we'd heard while I was rolling up the tent. From somewhere above us the older man answered, not with a shout, with two solid knocks against wood. I watched Alyssa understand it at the same time I did. The noise that had made us leave camp hadn't been somebody cutting firewood. One of them had been close enough to watch us pack. He'd signaled the other man. They'd known we were coming down the road. The younger man stayed where he was for a while. He didn't look hurried. He rested the axe against his leg and watched the old track. I could see his boots, the bottom of his pants, and one hand. Dirt had worn into the creases of his fingers. He was so close to where we needed to go that I could have spoken to him in a normal voice. Alyssa held my sleeve. I wanted her to squeeze harder. I needed to feel her there. We stayed there long enough for the position to start hurting. My bad knee was bent underneath me. Every time I shifted weight onto the other leg, the dry material under my shoe made a noise. I couldn't work out whether the man would hear it. Everything sounded incredibly loud from where I was crouching. Alyssa had her phone in her hand. She checked the screen once, then slid it into her pocket. There still wasn't any service. I tried to work out how far we were from the main road. 15 minutes by car could mean a long walk on a rough road. I hadn't paid attention to the distance when we'd driven in. I remembered turns and trees, and telling Alyssa that we could always try somewhere else if we didn't find a place to camp. I wished we'd kept driving. The man below us moved sideways, out of the little opening where I could see him. I leaned forward slightly. Alyssa caught my wrist and held it. We didn't know where he'd gone, and she didn't want me raising my head. From uphill, the older man called her name. I felt her grip tightened. He called it again, correctly. Not some name that sounded close. Her actual name, in the voice of a person trying to find someone he knew. He said I was back at the car. He said I'd been hurt, and she needed to come up there. I was right beside her. We could both hear him lying. There was something so awful about hearing a stranger use that voice while saying her name that I felt close to being sick. I'd been calling to her across the clearing the day before. We'd talked in the tent for an hour. He could have learned both our names without doing anything more than listening. I thought about the chair. I thought about how I'd woken up, heard a little metallic noise, and convinced myself that nine quiet minutes meant we were safe. The older man stopped calling. We heard brush move above us. It wasn't close yet, but it was getting closer. I looked at the ground on the other side of the roots. There was a gap we could crawl through, although it led away from the road. Beyond that was more hillside and more trees. I didn't know whether we'd be able to get back to the old track without crossing in front of the man with the axe. Alyssa touched the can in my hand, then pointed down hill. I nodded, but I didn't move. I was trying to pick the exact right moment. I know that because I remember waiting for a sound or a movement that would tell me what to do, as if there were going to be a clear opening where we could stand up and leave. Instead, dirt started falling from the top of the root base. Just a little at first. It landed on the back of my wrist. I looked up. A shoe pressed into the soil above us. I could see part of the soul through a gap between two roots. The younger man hadn't walked away. He'd come around. I pulled my hand back against my chest. His shoe moved. More dirt came down. Alyssa closed her eyes for a second, then opened them and looked directly at me. I don't know what my face looked like. Hers was wide around the mouth. He stood over us without saying anything. I could hear him breathing. Then the head of the axe came into view. He was holding it down beside his knee. A bit of dull metal, some brown wood, and part of his hand. It was only a few feet from my face. I kept expecting him to lower his head and look through the gap. I couldn't raise the spray without brushing against the roots. I had it pinned between my forearm and my chest, and all I could think about was how stupid it would be to die holding the thing I'd brought to protect us. Above him, the older man asked if he could see us. He didn't answer immediately. He shifted again. The axe moved out of view. Then, from somewhere below the road, we heard a vehicle. It was faint at first, a steady engine noise that rose and dropped as somebody climbed the bends. The younger man turned toward it. I knew he had, because his shoe turned in the soil above us. Alyssa heard it too. Her eyes went past me toward the road. The engine was getting louder. For the first time since we'd left the car, there was someone else out there. But we were still up on the hill, with a man standing over us, and another man somewhere behind him. Whoever was driving could go right past below us without seeing anything. The younger man spoke toward the slope above. Somebody's coming. The older man told him to stay there. I heard him move back up hill. Maybe he was going to get the pickup. Maybe he wanted to stop whoever was coming before they reached the log. I didn't know. What I knew was that the man above our hiding place was still close enough to reach down and touch Alyssa. I had the keys in my pocket. Most of the old track had taken us sideways across the hill. The car wasn't far directly above us. I reached slowly with my free hand. It took more effort than it should have to find the right button without looking. My thumb kept slipping off the rubber. I could feel the little raised symbols, but my hands were shaking so much I wasn't sure which one I was touching. I held the alarm button. Nothing happened. For one terrible second I thought we were too far away. Then the horn began sounding in the clearing. The younger man stepped off the root base. The older man shouted from up hill. I didn't wait to hear what he said. I pulled Alyssa toward the gap beside us. We crawled through it, got onto our feet, and started down the slope at an angle away from the old track. The younger man saw us almost immediately. He yelled and I heard brush breaking behind us. We weren't going to outrun him. My knee wouldn't bend properly and the ground was too steep to move quickly without falling. Alyssa was holding my arm, trying to keep me upright, which made her slower too. I told her to keep going. She didn't let go. I said it again, louder, and she looked back at me. I turned around. The man was coming through the brush above us. He'd lost the cap somewhere, and without it I could see that his hair was flattened against his head. He wasn't making threats. His mouth was open, and he was breathing hard. That part still bothers me. He looked like a person doing something difficult that he wanted to finish. He reached for my shirt. I got the safety clip off the spray and brought it up. I'd spent years carrying that can without using it. In my head, using it would have been a clear controlled thing. What actually happened was ugly and confusing. I sprayed him, then stumbled backward, and some of it blew into my own face. My eyes hurt immediately. He made a choking sound and swung his free arm. I felt his fingers catch the front of my shirt before the fabric slipped out of his hand. Then he dropped to one knee. Alyssa grabbed me from behind and pulled. We fell down part of the slope together. I scraped one forearm along a rock and landed on my side hard enough that I couldn't take a breath. For a moment, I couldn't see the road, or the man, or Alyssa. I could only feel the burning in my eyes. She kept telling me to stand up. I got my hands underneath me. One still held the spray. The engine below us had stopped. That terrified me more than it should have. I thought the driver must have turned around. I thought we'd miss the only other person who was going to come up that road. Then a man called from below. He asked if somebody needed help. Alyssa started shouting. I hadn't heard her make a sound like that before. She wasn't screaming words over and over. She was trying to make him understand, as quickly as she could, that there were two people coming after us, and that we needed him to stay. We got through the last of the brush. There was a dark blue pickup on the road, stopped beside the pale rock. Two men were inside. The driver had his window down, and the passenger was leaning across to look up at us. I understood afterward how we must have looked. I'd been rubbing my face with a dirty hand. There was blood on my arm and dust all over our clothes. We'd come down the bank shouting while a car alarm went off somewhere above us. The driver didn't immediately get out. I'm glad he didn't. Alyssa got to the road first and said somebody had broken our car window with an axe. The passenger looked behind her. His whole expression changed. The younger man had come out of the brush above us. He was bent forward, wiping at his face with his sleeve. He kept stopping to brace himself against a tree. He wasn't running anymore, but he was still coming toward us, with the axe in his other hand. The passenger unlocked the rear door. Alyssa opened it and climbed in. I got to the truck, just as the younger man started down the last few yards of bank. I tried to pull myself into the back seat, but my injured knee caught against the doorframe. Alyssa took hold of my shirt with both hands. The passenger turned around, reached back and grabbed my wrist. Between them, they pulled me inside. I got the door closed and the driver hit the lock button. I heard the locks snap down just before the younger man reached us. He tried the handle once, hard. Then the driver put the truck in reverse. The ax hit the outside of the door as we started moving. It was a hard, flat impact, close enough that I felt it through my shoulder. The driver didn't stop. The man lost his grip on the handle and stumbled after us. As the truck backed away, I watched him through the windshield, passed the driver's shoulder. Then we rounded the bend, and I couldn't see him anymore. Nobody in the truck spoke for a few seconds. The driver was concentrating on reversing down a narrow dirt road. His passenger had turned around and was looking at us. Then looking passed us to make sure the man wasn't coming back. I kept trying to tell them there was another one. My throat hurt from the spray. The words didn't come out clearly. Alyssa said it for me. She told them about the gray pickup and the log. The driver nodded without taking his eyes off the road. He backed into the old logging spur we'd passed the previous afternoon. There was enough room at its entrance for him to turn around. Then we were facing downhill. I remember the sound of the engine as he accelerated. I remember putting both feet on the floor because I needed to feel something solid underneath me. Alyssa still had a handful of my shirt. The two men were brothers heading in to scout a place to camp with friends the following weekend. They knew the road, although they hadn't camped at our clearing. They'd heard the horn, then heard people up on the hill and stopped because they couldn't tell what was happening. The passenger asked if we had anything on us that could hurt them. It took me a second to understand why. I was still holding the spray. I said it carefully on the floor between my feet and told him what it was. Then I started apologizing because I'd gotten some on the seat and I didn't know whether it would make their eyes burn too. He told me to stop worrying about the seat. I cried after that. Not for long and not in any way that made me feel better. I just couldn't keep it in anymore. The driver stopped once at a wider bend with a clearer view down the hill when his brother's phone picked up service. His brother called for help while the driver kept the truck running. He knew the road number. He could explain where the entrance was and where they'd found us. Those were things I hadn't been able to do. My own phone had service again too. I kept looking at the screen, ready to call if his connection failed. The passenger told me he'd gotten through and I could put mine down. I did, but I kept staring at it. When we reached pavement, I expected to feel safe immediately. That was how the shorter version of this story ended. We got back to the main road and I could breathe again. The truth is that I kept turning around to look through the back window. Every gray vehicle made my stomach tighten. We met the responding deputies at a place where the brothers could pull completely off the road. One deputy talked to us while the others went toward the forest road. I told him there were two men. I told him about the axe and the pickup and the broken window. I don't think I mentioned the rain fly until he asked why we'd left the clearing in such a hurry. Once I started explaining that part, Alyssa began crying. He didn't suggest we'd imagined it. That helped more than I can explain. We were taken to get checked out. My knee was badly bruised and swollen, but nothing was broken. I had cuts on my forearm and a scrape down my side. Alyssa had cut her hand on some of the glass when she pushed the tent away from the rear window. Neither of us had noticed the cut until someone pointed it out. We spent a lot of time answering the same questions. Where had we camped? Which man came to the window first? Had we seen a gun? Had either man said what he wanted? We hadn't seen a gun. They'd wanted us out of the car. That was all we knew at the time. Both men were arrested later that morning. They'd moved the log and driven out. But by then the deputies had a description of their truck and knew which road they were coming from. The damaged rear corner from our car scraping past made it even easier to identify. The younger man still had trouble opening his eyes when they stopped him. The brother's truck had a fresh mark in its rear door where he'd hit it. Our car was still in the clearing, with broken glass in the back seat and damaged down the passenger side. There was plenty that didn't depend on two frightened people agreeing about what they'd seen in the dark. A deputy went back to the clearing with me several days later after we'd already given our statements and the car had been removed. I wanted to show him exactly where the tent had been. Alissa didn't come. She said she'd seen enough of that place. I almost changed my mind when we turned off the pavement. In daylight, with another person beside me and nothing waiting in the clearing, it was still difficult to get out. The deputy let me take my time. I showed him the flat patch, the fallen tree, and the place where I'd found the fly. He went around behind the trunk and crouched down in the shallow dip. I couldn't see him anymore. He was a grown man wearing a uniform, and from the place where our tent had stood, all I could see was the top of a branch in front of him. He stood up again. I didn't need him to explain anything. There were flattened places in the dry material behind the log and a crushed drink can pushed underneath one end. Those things weren't proof by themselves. I knew that. People could have been there before us. What eventually settled it was what the older man admitted. I wasn't in the room when he was questioned. I learned about it through the case afterward. He acknowledged pulling the rain fly off. He called it messing around. He said we'd been telling scary stories, and he thought it would be funny. He also admitted sitting in the chair after we'd gone quiet. I asked whether he'd said how long he sat there. The answer I got was that he'd said he didn't know. I've never believed that. He'd stayed behind the fallen tree when I came out with the flashlight. When I picked up the fly, he'd been within a few feet of me. I'd turned my back on that spot to look at the road. Then I'd gotten into the tent and told Alyssa we were probably fine. He'd heard that too. The rest came out over the months that followed. The younger man admitted they'd blocked the road and waited for us. They meant to get us out of the car, take us away from the road, tie us up, and steal the car, and what we'd brought. They'd brought restraints. Investigators found them in the truck. The ax blows were signals. The younger man had watched us pack while the older one waited near the log. After signaling, he'd cut straight down the hillside to their pick-up, which they'd left in the wide spot above the blocked section. He'd been waiting for us to drive past before pulling out behind us. There wasn't a ritual involved. Nothing we'd talked about had brought anything into the woods. Two men had seen us camping alone, realized how easily they could get close to us and decided to stay. The older man wanted to call the night before a prank, and the morning a misunderstanding. The broken glass, the brothers who'd picked us up, and the younger man's account made that difficult. Both men eventually pleaded guilty and went to prison. Neither has been released. We signed up to be notified if that changes. I wanted that part in the full version because stopping the first account at the main road left out what happened afterward. We reported it, the men were caught, and both had to answer for what they'd done. The case is over. It took us a while to feel that way ourselves. For months, I woke up whenever Alyssa moved beside me. She had a hard time sitting with her back to an open doorway. We talked to somebody about it, separately at first, and then together. That helped. So did having ordinary weekends where nothing happened, and we didn't spend all of Sunday discussing what we'd missed on that hill. We got married two years after the trip. We still go outside. We still hike. Last summer, we camped again for the first time. At a busy campground with two friends and a family arguing cheerfully over breakfast at the next site. I slept badly the first night, but I slept. The old tent went in the trash once we were allowed to get rid of it. I cut it up before putting it in the bin because I didn't want someone taking it and using it. I kept thinking I'd feel foolish afterward. I didn't. The part I come back to now isn't the ax hitting the truck. It isn't even seeing that man's shoe above our heads. It's the conversation in the tent after I put the fly back. Alyssa asked whether we should leave, and I made being scared into something we needed to explain away before we could do anything about it. Then she tried to believe me because she wanted me to be right. We don't do that anymore. On our first night back camping, she told me she wanted the tent closer to our friends. I moved it. We were settled in again in 10 minutes, and she fell asleep with her hand resting on my arm. Harry was supposed to leave before me. Her car was old, and she'd spent part of that afternoon explaining a noise it made on hills. When I saw her standing beside the road, I assumed it had broken down and she'd walked out to flag me down. This was in September outside Cloudcroft, New Mexico. Five of us had rented a little recreation property for a weekend. There was a kitchen building, some camping spaces, and a covered area with tables. Being organized, just adults who had trouble finding a weekend when nobody had to work. I'd driven up alone, my name is Tessa, and I was 37 at the time. Harry was 40, her husband Dean was 42, and we'd known each other for about nine years. I managed the front desk at a dental office, and Harry worked in an insurance office in the same shopping center. We weren't people who only saw each other at occasional parties. The eight lunch with me most Wednesdays. I knew her face very well. I'm making that distinction because I've had people suggest I picked up a woman who resembled her. I wish that explanation fit what happened. It doesn't. Our other two friends left on Sunday afternoon. Harry, Dean, and I stayed to clean the kitchen and put the tables away. We'd paid a cleaning deposit we couldn't really afford to lose. By the time we finished, it was getting dark, and we still had to carry our stuff out to the parking area. The property was reached by a private gravel road. It went through trees for a little over four miles before meeting a paved county road. Near the paved end was a steel gate. The owner had given each driver a key. We were supposed to close and lock the gate every time we went through, even if other people were still on the property. An older track branched off the parking area toward the owner's equipment shed and a water spigot. We were allowed to use the wash area there, but the track beyond it was off limits. He drawn a simple diagram on the rental agreement and crossed out the section past the shed. The gravel road to the gate was the only exit we were supposed to use. We had driven it on Friday. There weren't a lot of decisions to make on the way home. Mary had a blue station wagon. I had a small grey sedan. She and Dean carried out their bags while I went back to the kitchen for a casserole dish I'd left soaking. It still needed scrubbing, and I spent another ten minutes at the sink. When I came out with it, their car wasn't in its space anymore. I assumed they'd left. I didn't see them drive away, and that was one of the first things the deputy later made sure I understood. Seeing an empty parking space isn't the same as seeing a car leave. I put the dish on the floor behind my seat. I checked that the kitchen door was shut, loaded the bag of trash we were taking to town, and called goodbye toward the dark parking area in case they were still nearby. I didn't hear an answer. My phone had no service there, which we already knew from the weekend. I started the car and left. I was tired in the very ordinary way you get, after cleaning up something you thought would take twenty minutes. My hand smelled of dish soap. I had a damp cuff where I'd leaned against the sink. All I wanted was to get down the gravel road, lock the gate, and buy something hot to drink before the longer drive home. The road wasn't a terrifying road. I want to be fair about that. It was narrow, but two vehicles could pass in the wider spots. It curved through the trees, with shallow ditches along the edges. The owner had recently added gravel to a section near the top. I was doing maybe fifteen miles an hour, less than the turns, because it was a borrowed weekend, and I didn't want a damaged tire to become the expensive part of it. About half a mile from the parking area, I came around a bend, and saw Carrie on the right shoulder. She was wearing the rust-colored pullover she'd had on all evening. Her dark hair was pulled back. She held one arm up, palm toward me, and stood far enough off the road that I didn't have to swerve. I stopped beside her and lowered the passenger window a few inches. She said, "Can you take me down?" I asked where Dean was, back at the car. That was exactly the answer I expected. I unlocked the doors, and she got in. There was no big moment when my instincts told me to drive away. I didn't fight an urge to help. I was pleased that if their car had broken down, at least I was still there. We'd spent most of the evening talking about who had taken home whose containers after the previous get-together. This was a person I trusted sitting in my passenger seat. I asked whether the car had made it very far. She said it was back up the road. I took that to mean the older track. Maybe they'd pulled into the wash area and couldn't get the car started again. I hadn't passed them on the main road, and the shed was hidden from the parking area by trees. I hadn't looked down that track before leaving. She put on the seatbelt. That detail has bothered me more than almost anything else. She drew it across her chest, pushed the metal part into the buckle, and gave the strap a small pull. She knew how to do it. I asked whether they needed a jump or someone to collect them. She said we should get to the gate first. She can be short with people when she's frustrated. She gets embarrassed about things going wrong, even when they aren't her fault. I decided not to make her explain the car while she was still upset. We could get a signal near the pavement and work it out there. For the next minute, the only thing that seemed wrong was how she was sitting. Her knees were together, both hands resting on them. Carrie usually took up whatever room she had. She'd put a bag between her feet, turn slightly toward me, push her sleeves up, and start talking before I'd finished the question. This woman sat facing forward. She didn't look at me when I spoke. Then I noticed she didn't have her bag. She carried a big green handbag with a stiff handle. It was an irritating bag, because there was never anywhere to put it at lunch. I had watched her collect it from the kitchen counter less than half an hour before. If she was coming down the road to call for help, she'd need her phone, and her phone was usually in that bag. I asked if she'd left it with Dean. She said yes. There wasn't anything impossible about that. I need to emphasize how easily each detail could be explained by itself. She was upset. She'd left a bag. She didn't feel like talking. You don't tell a friend to get out of your car because she's sitting differently. I turned the heat up a little. It was much cooler in those wooded hills than it had been when we'd started the drive up from the lower country on Friday. Her pullover looked thin. I asked if she was cold. She said, "Your house is closer." My house wasn't closer. I lived well over an hour away, and there were places to get help long before we reached it. I thought she meant it was closer than her house, which was true. If the car needed to stay somewhere overnight, she and Dean could stay with me. That would have been fine. I said we'd have to get Dean first. She moved her head a little, not a nod, more a small adjustment, as if she'd been holding it at an uncomfortable angle. He can come after. That was when I first felt annoyed with her. Dean had done almost all the carrying that evening because Carrie's shoulder was bothering her. He'd spent the weekend making sure everybody had what they needed, leaving him up there with a broken car while we drove to my place didn't seem like her. I told her we weren't going to leave him, and that she should try calling him once we had service. She said, "All right." We went around the next bend. The light from the dashboard was low, but I could see her hands. There was dirt under her nails. Not an extraordinary amount, but enough that I noticed it, because we'd both just washed dishes. Her hands were also bare. Carrie wore a wedding band and a narrow ring with a small blue stone. She took them off for certain jobs, so that wasn't proof of anything either. I wondered whether she'd been trying to help Dean with the car. I asked what they'd done to it. What? The car. Did you get it started again at all? She didn't answer for several seconds, then she said, "It wouldn't go." I remember pressing my tongue against the inside of my cheek. I was tired, and this was starting to feel like one of those conversations where you had to pull every bit of information out of somebody. I was thinking about how much longer it would take to get home. I still wasn't afraid. We reached a shallow dip where the road crossed a dry creek bed. A concrete slab formed the crossing, with loose gravel over it and a short post on either side. I'd gone slowly over it on the way in, because the change in surface gave the car a hard little bump. As we crossed it, my passenger lifted both feet off the floor. Not much, just enough that her knees rose. She kept her hands flat on her legs and held that position until we were on gravel again. I thought she might be protecting sore feet from the jolt. When I realized I hadn't seen her shoes, I couldn't look down properly while driving. There was another turn ahead. I kept my eyes on the road, and when we straightened out I glanced across. The toe nearest me was gray. The same color as the running shoes Carrie had worn that day. But it was much narrower. were. The fabric, or whatever I thought was fabric, had no seem where the soul should have met it. I told myself the light was bad. I wish I could give a more impressive account of my own judgment. What I actually did was keep driving and try to become less irritated. I thought maybe Carrie was feeling ill and wasn't ready to tell me. She'd complained about a headache before we started cleaning. People can be quiet for reasons that have nothing to do with you. I asked her whether she wanted some water. There was an unopened bottle in the cup holder between us. She picked it up. She turned it in her hands once, looking down at it. Then she put it back without opening it. "You can have it," I said. She said she knew. Something about that answer made me look at her face again. Her mouth was closed and her cheeks were too still. Carrie had a little irritated expression she wore when her head hurt. She'd press her lips together and draw one side of her mouth back. This face wasn't doing any of that. It was Carrie's face at rest, without any of the things Carrie usually did with it. I stopped talking. I started paying attention. There was a stretch where the road ran straight for a few hundred yards. You could see the next rise, and beyond it, the trees opened a little. On the way in, Carrie had managed to send a message from that rise. She'd made a point of telling us because none of us had been able to use our phones at the property. My phone was in the open tray below the heater controls. It lit up as we approached the rise. I didn't touch it. I could see Carrie's name on the screen. At first I thought her phone was in her bag at the car, and Dean was using it. That would have made perfect sense. He wanted to know how far we'd gotten or whether we'd found someone to help. I pressed the button on the steering wheel to answer. My car put calls through its speakers. I hadn't thought about that being a problem. Carrie said my name, not the person beside me. Carrie on the phone. She sounded out of breath and irritated. She asked whether I still had the gate key. I said yes. She started explaining that they'd moved their car to the water spigot by the owner's equipment shed to rinse out the big cooler. That was a short way down the older track. Now the car wouldn't start. Dean thought it was the battery connection, but neither of them had the right tools. They'd carried the bags back to the kitchen building, where the owner had said they could stay until morning. She'd walked up the short slope behind the kitchen, and found enough signal to call the owner. He was going to bring what they needed in the morning, and had offered to let me know they were staying. Carrie had tried me herself while she still had reception. She didn't want me turning around to collect them when they already had somewhere dry to sleep. While she was telling me this, the woman in my passenger seat turned to look at the phone. Her movement was slow. Her shoulders stayed where they were. The side of her face came into the light from the screen. It was still Carrie's face. I gripped the steering wheel so hard that my fingers started to ache. There was no place to stop safely on that stretch without stopping in the road. I kept moving. I said, you're both still up there? Carrie said yes. Then she asked if I was alright. My passenger looked at me. I'd spent almost nine years with Carrie. I'd seen her laugh while she had food in her mouth. I'd seen her cry. I'd sat beside her when she was half asleep after a long day. I had never seen her look at another person the way this woman looked at me then. Her eyes were on my mouth. She seemed to be waiting to see what I would say. I told the real Carrie that I was fine, and that I was nearly at the gate. I wasn't nearly there. We still had something close to two miles to go. She said the owner had reminded her that it needed to be locked, even with their car still inside. He had his own key. "Go back to Dean," I said. "Stay inside until morning." There was a pause. "I will," she said. I told her I'd call later. I pressed the button to end the call before she could ask anything else. For a while, neither of us spoke. I had several explanations, and I tried every one. Carrie had lent her phone to somebody. I had misunderstood the call. Dean was playing some unpleasant joke with recorded speech. The woman in the seat was someone else from the property, and I had mistaken her for Carrie in bad light. There had only been five of us on that property all weekend. The other two friends had left hours earlier. Neither looked remotely like Carrie. I couldn't hold any explanation together for more than a few seconds. The person beside me said, "She'll be fine." I looked at the road. She said it again. I remember wanting to correct her. It was such a small foolish impulse. I wanted to say that Carrie had meant both herself and Dean, that she'd said they, and that my passenger was making the same mistake she had made when she'd suggested leaving him behind. Instead, I said, "Good." My passenger settled back against the seat. I had to make a decision. I could stop and demand that she explain herself. I could reach for my phone. I could tell her to get out. I could keep driving. She was close enough to touch my neck. The road was narrow there, with barely any shoulder between the gravel and the ditch beside it. I didn't know whether she had a weapon. I didn't even know what question to ask that would make any of this better. I kept driving. I didn't suddenly know how to act calm. My right leg was shaking against the center console. I had to ease off the accelerator because my foot was pressing too hard. I could feel a separate little tremor in my lower lip, and I kept pressing my mouth closed to hide it. The only useful thought I had was that she'd allowed the call to finish. Whatever was beside me had heard carry speaking. It knew I'd heard her too. It hadn't attacked me. It was still sitting there with the seat belt fastened, apparently willing to continue down the road. That didn't make me safe. It gave me one thing to work with. As long as I kept driving, there might be time to think. I couldn't dial for help without taking my eyes off the road and reaching down toward the tray beside her knee. I could try using the voice controls, but she'd hear everything I said. We were also leaving the little patch of reception. There was no promise that a call would connect. I began thinking about places I could drive to. The gate, the county road, then the route toward town. There would be other people. Even if nothing was open, there would be houses. I could sound the horn and keep sounding it until someone came out. My passenger said, "Not that way." We hadn't reached a junction. I hadn't turned or spoken. For a second I thought she knew what I was thinking, and that was worse than anything that had happened so far. Then she pointed ahead. A narrow spur went down to a maintenance clearing. I'd noticed it on Friday because there was an old picnic table beside it, with its legs removed. A reflective strip on the table edge caught the headlights. The spur wasn't an exit. The owner had mentioned it when he gave us directions. She wanted me to take that track. I said the gate was straight ahead. This is closer. I told her I wasn't taking a road I didn't know in the dark. She moved her left hand off her knee. I watched it without looking directly at it. It rested on the center arm rest. Fingers spread. Her sleeve pulled back enough to show her wrist. There was a fold in the skin just above her hand. I first took it for the cuff of an undershirt. It was the same pale brown as the rest of her arm. The fold ran across the wrist, then continued part way up its side. When she flexed her fingers it opened slightly. There wasn't a cut. There wasn't blood. The skin simply didn't appear to be attached the way skin should be attached. I went past the spur. Her hand came across and closed around my right forearm just above the wrist. I almost drove off the road. She didn't jerk the wheel or strike me. She held my arm firmly enough that I couldn't move it. The car started drifting toward the ditch and I corrected with my left hand. I said louder than I'd intended that she needed to let go or we were going to crash. She looked through the windshield. Her grip loosened. I brought the car back to the center of the road. My right arm hurt where her fingers had pressed through my sleeve. I could still feel four narrow points of pressure even after her hand returned to her lap. She had fingers. I could see all five on the hand she'd used. But the places where she'd pressed me were closer together than I expected and the ends had felt hard through my sleeve. I didn't say another word about the spur. My main concern had changed. Until then I'd been frightened of someone who looked like my friend and might hurt me. After seeing that wrist and feeling that hand, I didn't believe I was alone in the car with a human being. I understand how that reads. I can't give you a better description. I wasn't thinking about a particular creature. I wasn't running through stories I'd heard. I was trying to keep the car straight and work out how to put a closed door between myself and the thing sitting beside me. We came to a wider section where the owner had left a pile of gravel. There was room there to turn a truck around. I considered stopping, grabbing my keys and getting out. Then I looked at the trees beyond the gravel and abandoned that idea. There was nowhere I could run that I could reach faster than someone who was already within arm's length of me. Getting to the pavement was also my best chance of sending help to carry and deem. At least the car was moving away from them. The gate was still ahead. I knew what it looked like. Two heavy posts, a steel farm gate, and a chain with a padlock at the latch end. It opened back toward the property. When it was fully open, you could swing it against the uphill bank on the left, keeping the whole road clear. On Friday, Dean had opened it while Carrie and I waited in our cars. On the way out, someone would have to do the same thing. I had the key on a separate ring in the little pocket of my jeans. It wasn't attached to my car key. The owner had told each of us to return our key to the lock box on the roadside of the post after locking up on our final trip out. If I got out to open the gate, I'd be standing in the road with the car behind me and the thing able to follow. If it got out, even for a few seconds, I'd have a chance. I started trying to think of a reason Carrie should open a gate. That sounds absurd. Why would I still be pretending this was Carrie? It had used her appearance to make me unlock a door. It had put on a seatbelt. It had answered basic questions. I didn't know how to fight it, but I could keep asking it to behave like the person it was pretending to be. I told it my left ankle was cramping from driving so slowly. It looked down at my legs. My car was an automatic. I realized that too late. I wasn't using my left foot to drive at all. I added that it had been stiff since we'd carried the tables. That was actually true. I'd caught my foot under one of the legs and bent it awkwardly. Carrie had been there when it happened. She'd asked if I was okay. The thing didn't say anything. I said I'd pull close to the gate and asked if it could open it for me. It answered, "You do it." There wasn't any anger in the words. There wasn't much of anything. It sounded like an instruction on a form. I said I could, but it would take me a minute to walk it off. I kept my voice as ordinary as I could. I was afraid that if I pleaded, it would understand how badly I needed it outside. The thing turned its face toward the windshield again. I didn't push. I still had road left. I couldn't make a whole plan out of a request it had already refused. I tried thinking of other options. I could park with the passenger side tight against the bank and climb out my door. But then I'd be leaving on foot. I could break hard and try to get out while it's belt held it in place. I'd have to undo mine first, though, and I couldn't count on reaching the door before it reached me. I kept coming back to the gate. It was a real obstacle. It wasn't an excuse I had invented. If we wanted to continue, one of us had to open it. Ahead, the road began the last gentle descent. There was a low ridge between us and the pavement. Once we'd rounded the ridge, I'd be able to see the gate. The thing shifted in the seat. The seat belt moved against its pullover. That was when I noticed the cloth beneath the strap wasn't wrinkling properly. The belt crossed its chest, and the rust-colored surface flattened beneath it. But there was no loose material on either side. No gathered fold. The texture looked woven until it stretched. I glanced away too quickly. It noticed. For the first time, it smiled. Kerry's smile showed the upper teeth on one side a little more than the other. This smile opened evenly. It kept widening after I expected it to stop. I couldn't look at it long enough to tell you what was inside its mouth. I could see the ends of the lips pulling back toward its cheeks. That was enough. I said, "I need to watch this turn." The smile went away. We rounded the ridge. The gate was closed. I stopped well back from it, where the road was wide enough to leave room beside the car. Beyond the gate, the gravel continued for a short distance before meeting the pavement. I could see the pale surface of the junction, but no traffic. I put the car in park and kept my foot on the brake for a few seconds we sat there. The headlights lit the gate, its chain, and a patch of the bank behind the hinge post. I could hear the heater fan. My passenger watched the gate without moving. I took the key out of my pocket. It was a plain brass key with a small round plastic tag. The tag had the properties name on it. I rubbed my thumb over its edge because I couldn't make my hands stay still. I held it out. The thing didn't take it. "You open it," it said. I said my ankle was hurting, and that it would be quicker if she did it. I called her Carrie. I hadn't used her name since the call. It turned toward me. The skin along the side of its neck had formed a low crease above the collar. The crease moved upward, then settled. I watched it happen without understanding what muscle could have caused it. I lowered the key into the empty cup holder beside the water bottle. "All right," I said. I'm going to sit for a minute first. I didn't move toward the door. I turned the heater down. I looked through the windshield and tried to breathe at a normal rate. I was waiting for it to touch me. Every part of my attention was on the space between its hand and my arm. I knew that if it grabbed me again, I might start screaming and never regain enough control to do anything useful. It said we needed to go. I said we'd go when I could walk on my ankle. This wasn't bravery. It was the only refusal I could think of that still belonged in a normal conversation. I was a tired driver with a sore ankle asking her friend to open a gate. I kept reducing it to that in my mind. I needed the next thing that happened to be small enough for me to manage. A vehicle went past on the paved road. I couldn't see much of it. This lights crossed the junction beyond the gate and disappeared. But it meant we were no longer completely alone in the woods. Somebody had been less than a hundred yards from us. I pressed the horn. The things hand moved so quickly that I only saw it arrive on the center of the steering wheel beside mine. It didn't cover my hand. It pushed my wrist away. I let the horn stop. We looked at each other. I said I was trying to get help with the gate. There was no reason to believe that driver would come back. They might not even have heard us. I wasn't depending on them. But my passenger had reacted immediately. It didn't want me attracting attention from the road. I moved my hand back toward the horn, slowly enough that it could see. It held out its other hand for the key. I picked up the ring and gave it to the thing. I didn't throw it or make a quick movement. I placed it on the palm and its fingers closed over mine for a moment before releasing them. The hand was warm. I hadn't expected that. I had been trying to think of it as something separate from a person. Something that would feel obviously wrong. Its warmth made the contact worse. It undid the belt and opened the door. I almost pressed the accelerator while the car was still in park. My foot moved before I decided what to do. I forced it back onto the brake and waited for the door to close. The thing stood beside the car. In the headlights spilling past the front fender, it looked less like carry. It was taller than she'd seemed in the seat. The rust-colored pullover ended at the right place, but the legs below it were too long. The gray shapes I'd taken for shoes had no laces. The ends flattened when it put weight on them. It bent down and looked through the open passenger door. "Wait," it said. I nodded. It closed the door and went toward the latch end of the gate. I pressed the lock button and shifted into drive, keeping my foot hard on the brake. The lock button made a small sound. The thing stopped. I held still. It turned its head looking back at me through the windshield. Then it continued to the post. I don't know whether it understood that I'd lock the doors. I wasn't sure the locks could keep it out. It had been inside my car. It knew where I was sitting. If it came back before the gate opened, I'd have very few choices left. It worked the key into the padlock. That took longer than it would have taken carry. It used both hands, holding the padlock up toward its face. The chain pulled tight against the gate. I could see its elbows moving, but not the key itself. I had put the car in drive so I wouldn't have to do it later. I had locked the doors so I wouldn't forget. I still had my seat belt on. There was nothing else to prepare. I could only sit there and wait while it opened the one thing keeping me from the pavement. The chain dropped. The thing pulled the gate back toward us. It walked across the road with the free end, bringing it over toward the uphill bank on the left. I remembered Dean doing the same thing two days earlier. The ordinary movement was so close to his that for one brief moment, I nearly expected the things that you're doing. to stop there and wave me through. It didn't. It stopped with the gate only partway open. There was enough room for my car, but barely. The end of the gate stood several feet out from the left bank. If I drove through, I'd have to keep close to the right post. It stood beside the end, facing me. I eased off the break. The car moved forward. I kept it slow for the first few feet because I needed room to steer toward the right side of the opening. The thing didn't move. It was waiting for me to stop beside it. When my hood drew level with the free end of the gate, I pressed the accelerator. It let go of the steel bar and lunge toward my side of the car. It's hand struck the rear door on my side. I felt the impact through the car. The door handle made a sharp snapping sound. I kept going, close enough to the right post that I expected to lose my mirror. The mirror cleared. The back of the car went through. I could see the thing in the outside mirror, no longer standing upright. Its arms reached the gravel ahead of its body. The fabric colored surface along its back had stretched smooth. Its head was low and the outline of carries pulled back hair had come apart into something flat against its neck. I watched only long enough to see it start after me. The road to the pavement was short. I didn't slow until I reached the junction and then I had to. There was no point escaping the gate only to pull into the path of a vehicle I hadn't seen. I looked both ways so quickly that my neck hurt. The road was empty. I turned right. The tires made a hard noise on the pavement as I accelerated. I kept my eyes forward. I wanted to look back, but the road curved and I was already going faster than I should have been. I forced myself to concentrate on staying in my lane. When I finally checked the mirror, nothing was behind me. That didn't mean I felt safe. I drove for several minutes convinced it would come alongside the window. Every slight movement of the car made me tighten my grip. I had to remind myself that I was on pavement now, that the car was moving properly, that there was room ahead. I reached a place with service and used the voice controls to call for help. I didn't tell the dispatcher I'd picked up something that looked like my friend. I said a passenger had attacked me on a private road and tried to force me onto a sidetrack. I said I'd gotten away and needed somewhere safe to stop. I gave the name of the recreation property and described the junction I'd just left. The dispatcher asked whether the person was still in the car. I checked the back seat so abruptly that I swerved. I'd known it was empty. I had watched the passenger get out, but the question made me need to see every inch of it. I said I was alone. She told me where to meet a deputy and stayed on the line while I drove. I repeated the name of the meeting place several times. Having a specific place to reach helped more than anything she could have said about being safe. I stopped in a lighted business parking area beside the deputy's vehicle. The business was closed, but the lot lights were on. I parked where he indicated, put the car in park, and realized I couldn't make my hands let go of the wheel. He came to my window. I lowered it and started talking. I don't remember much of what I said at first. I remember asking him to look inside the car before I got out. He did. There was no one under the folded blanket on the back seat. There was no one in the trunk. I knew that was unreasonable, but he checked anyway. Once I was standing outside, I could see that the rear handle on the driver's side had broken. The outer part hung loose. There were shallow dents in the door around it. The front passenger seat had a muddy mark along its lower edge, where something had rested against it. When I pushed up my right sleeve, there were four narrow pressure marks just above my wrist. I showed those to the deputy too. The deputy asked me to sit in his vehicle while he took the rest of my account. I told him about the call from Carrie. I showed him the time in my call history. I gave him her number and the owner's number from the rental agreement. I didn't hide the impossible parts. I had tried making it a simple assault for the dispatcher because I needed help quickly. Sitting there with the door shut, I told him what I'd actually seen. He didn't tell me it was a creature. He didn't tell me I was imagining it. He asked careful questions about lighting, distance, clothing, and when I had last seen the real Carrie. He asked whether I'd had anything to drink. I hadn't. The owner answered his phone. He confirmed he'd spoken with Carrie earlier about the car, and that she and Dean were supposed to be waiting in the kitchen building. He agreed to bring his tools and meet another deputy at the lower gate with his key. I wanted to go back for my friends, and I also knew I couldn't drive that road again that night. The deputy said there was no reason for me to do that. He had people going to them. Carrie and Dean were found inside the kitchen building, exactly where she'd said they would be. They hadn't seen anyone outside. Carrie's station wagon was in the wash area by the equipment shed. A loose battery terminal was the problem. The owner tightened it, and the car started. The gate was open. My little brass key was still in the padlock. There was no person waiting beside it, and no one in the maintenance clearing when they checked it. Nobody searched the whole forest in the dark. I didn't expect them to. The immediate job was getting Carrie and Dean out safely, and that was done. They came down behind the other deputy and met us before midnight. I couldn't look at Carrie when she first got out of the car. She understood that before I explained it. She stayed a few feet away and talked to me. Her voice came with all the little movements I recognized, the tilt of her head, the way she held her bag, the way she frowned when she was trying to understand a problem. She had both rings on. She had real shoes with laces, and one lace had a small knot near the end, because it had broken earlier that summer. We went through the evening together. The timing worked. While I'd been scrubbing the dish, they'd driven down to the spigot. Carrie had heard me call out and called goodbye back from behind the car, where she was rinsing the cooler. I hadn't heard her. They hadn't tried to start the station wagon again until after I'd gone. Nothing in her account required her to be on the main road where I'd picked up the passenger. I stayed at their house that night. The following morning, the owner and a deputy checked the property in daylight. They found no one. The owner shut the rental for the rest of that week, changed the gate lock, and collected the remaining keys. Mine came back to me in a small evidence bag a few weeks later, after the deputy had finished with it, and I gave it to the owner to dispose of. The report recorded an assault by an unidentified person. That was as far as the official explanation went. I don't resent it. The deputy could describe the damage, the marks on my arm, and what three separate people said about where they were. He couldn't identify something none of us could name. Someone I later told called it a skin walker. Other people have used other names. I don't have the knowledge to attach it to anybody's beliefs, and I don't want to pretend a name explains it. I know it could pass for Kerry in bad light. I know it could use simple words and work a seat belt. I know that when I refused to turn off the road, it grabbed me. I don't know why it wanted to go to my house. I won't turn that part into a fact, just because I can imagine reasons. What I can finish is the part involving us. Kerry and Dean came home. I had the damaged handle and door repaired. The pressure marks on my arm faded within a week. There were no later visits, no strange people at work, and no continuation of that night. I was slower to recover from seeing Kerry. For a while, I found reasons to stay behind my desk when she came to meet me for lunch. She noticed. We talked about it without making her responsible for fixing it. Eventually I could sit beside her again without checking her hands. A few months later, Kerry helped me clear out a storage unit. At the end of the day, we sat on the curb while Dean finished securing a load in the station wagon. She asked whether I was going to tell the story to anyone else. I said I probably would, eventually. I wanted her to read it first. She did. The only part she asked me to add was that she hadn't left Dean and wouldn't have. She's right. She stayed with him that night. I should have recognized the difference sooner, but I've made sure it's clear here. This is something I posted on crawler sightings a while back. I've gotten interested in the subject again, and I decided to put the whole thing in one place, because the version I posted before stopped well before the worst part. Back when I was in high school, my friend and I saw something in a cemetery in Rossville, Illinois. I've been calling it a crawler because that's the closest description I've found. I don't know if that's actually what it was. I don't know if all the people using that word are even talking about the same thing. For years, when I told this story, I ended it with us getting out of the cemetery. Later, I added what happened to a friend in Colorado, and mentioned the nightmares. I left those pretty vague. Part of that was embarrassment, and part of it was that I wanted to hear somebody else describe what we'd experienced without giving them the details first. That eventually happened. Before I get into it, this ended a little over four years ago. I'm sleeping normally now. So are the other people involved. I've talked about it since then without anything starting again, and nobody who only heard the story ever reported going through what we did. I don't think reading this does anything to you. I used to worry about that, but I worried about a lot of things back then. I'm changing the names. My friend from high school will be Heather. I can't give you an exact date for the cemetery siding. It would have been between 2007 and 2010, probably toward the middle of that stretch. I remember being back in school, and I remember that neither of us had a jacket. Late summer or early fall sounds right. If somebody from Rossville wants to figure out which warm evening had a nearly full moon that year, you're welcome to try. I don't trust my memory enough to narrow it down any further. The moon is one thing I do remember clearly, because without it, I doubt I would have seen the thing at all. Heather and I used to walk a loop around that part of town. We'd leave her place, go about a block to a side road leading toward the park, turn left, and cut through the park to a side entrance of the cemetery. The park and cemetery were at the southwest edge of town. Beyond them were woods and corn fields. Going straight through the cemetery brought us out to another road, and from there we could get to Main Street and back to her house. It wasn't some dare we'd come up with that night. We'd done it plenty of times. It was a quiet way to kill half an hour when there wasn't anything else to do. We weren't going out there to mess with graves or try to contact anything. I feel stupid even having to say that, but people asked after I posted the first version. We'd usually talk about school or whatever was happening with our friends. Sometimes we'd stop in the park. The cemetery was just part of the route. That evening, Heather was upset about something that had happened with a girl we both knew. I remember that, because she was still talking about it when we crossed into the cemetery, and I wasn't really listening. I was looking at the stones beside the drive. Some were bright enough in the moonlight, that you could see where the polished surfaces ended and the grass began. The main drive cut through the middle of the property. We were on it, a little beyond the side entrance, when there was a hard scrape to our left. It was a quick, rough sound. Something heavy had either struck the side of a stone or slid against it. Heather stopped talking. I stopped walking. Then she gave this short, nervous laugh, and asked if I'd heard that. I told her I'd seen what made it. There are a lot of things from that night that I've gone back and forth on. How far away it was, whether the grass was wet, how long we stood there before calling anyone. The thing itself has stayed the same. It was running behind the headstones on all fours. It had very pale skin, no visible hair, and a narrow body. I could see the bend of a knee and the long section of leg below it. Its arms were too long for the size of its torso, or at least that's how they looked while it was moving. Its back rose and fell, as it ran, and its feet came forward nearly between its hands before it pushed off again. That was the part my brain couldn't fix. A person can run on their hands and feet. I've seen people do it since, including people who are very good at it. There's still usually something about the movement that looks awkward. They have to work around the way a human body is built. This thing didn't. It covered the open space between two stones before I could even say anything. I saw it in profile, low to the ground, with its head extended forward. Then it passed behind a wider monument and disappeared. I didn't see its face. I didn't see clothes. I didn't see anything that let me turn it into an animal I recognized. Heather kept asking what I'd seen. I remember saying there was a person down there, then correcting myself because that wasn't really what I meant. I told her it was naked and crawling. That made her look toward the entrance we just used. Neither of us immediately ran. I know how that sounds. In every scary story, somebody does something you think you'd never do. I used to think I'd be sensible in a situation like that. But I was standing on a familiar road, in a place I'd walked through many times, trying to understand why I'd just seen what appeared to be a naked person running behind graves. My first feeling wasn't that we'd found a monster. It was that we might be near someone who was seriously unwell, and I had no idea what that person would do if we started running. We backed up a few steps together. There was another noise to our left, farther toward the park entrance. Heather grabbed my wrist. Whatever it was had moved back the way it had come, or something else was over there. I couldn't see it. The grass and stones were visible, but anything low enough could stay hidden behind them. We stopped backing up. For a while we heard nothing except ordinary insects and traffic, somewhere beyond the houses. I remember being able to see a light on a building outside the cemetery. It wasn't far away. That made the whole thing worse, in a way I still have trouble explaining. We weren't lost in a huge forest. People were probably watching television within a few minutes of us. Heather got her phone out and called a friend I'll call Brent. He was older than we were, but still in high school. He lived close enough that he could walk over. Heather told him there was a creepy person in the cemetery and asked him to come get us. He didn't take it seriously. I couldn't hear everything he said, but she kept telling him to stop laughing. Then she got angry enough that he apparently realized she meant it. He told him which entrance to use and stayed on the phone while we waited. During that call, I heard the grass moving on the opposite side of the drive. I turned my whole body toward it. There was nothing standing there. Nothing I could point to. Then a pale section of something passed through a gap between two stones. It wasn't another full view. It was a shoulder, I think, followed by an arm pressing down into the grass. The arm bent, and the pale part dropped out of sight. I pulled Heather toward the middle of the drive. She saw that one. Later, she described it as a bare elbow. I don't know if that's what she'd actually seen, or the nearest thing she could compare it to. She stopped arguing with Brent and told him to hurry. We couldn't decide which way to go. The entrance behind us was closer, but we'd heard it in that direction. The exit ahead was farther, and getting there meant passing another stretch of taller stones. We kept making these tiny decisions without following through. We'd move a few feet, hear something, stop, and look in the other direction. It never rushed us. At the time, that felt like the only good part. Looking back, I think the fact that it didn't rush us was why we stayed there as long as we did. We were waiting for it to do something obvious enough that we'd know how to react. Brent arrived from the park side. Heather was still on the phone with him, so we knew he was coming before we saw him. He had a small flashlight and was wearing shorts and an old school sweatshirt. I remember being incredibly relieved by how normal he looked. He shone the light at us, then across the stones. Naturally, he wanted to know where the naked guy was. Heather got mad at him again. I tried to explain what I'd seen. The more specific I got, the more amused he looked. He asked if we'd been drinking, then started crouching down and moving his arms around. It was exactly the kind of thing a high school boy would do. And it worked on us a little. Heather laughed, even though she'd been close to crying a minute earlier. I didn't think it was funny, but having him there made it easier to believe we'd overreacted. There were three of us now. He had a flashlight. He wasn't afraid. He wanted to take a look around before we left. I said no. Heather said we should just go home. He walked off the drive anyway toward the place where I'd first seen it. He wasn't going far. Maybe two rows of graves. He kept the light low and called out to whoever he thought was hiding there. I was watching him when Heather tightened her hand around my arm. Heather was moving on our right. Brent was to our left. It was a broad, continuous disturbance in the grass. Too low for us to see a body. It traveled away from the drive, then curved behind the stones. I couldn't tell whether the thing had crossed while we'd been watching Brent or had already been on that side. Heather told him to come back. He finally heard the movement to our right and stopped joking. He backed onto the drive beside us and swept his light across to that side. Heather was a flat stone there. One of the ones that sits only a few inches above the ground. As the light passed it, I saw a pale hand pull back behind a larger monument. thing was crouched behind it, with only its hand resting where the light could reach. The fingers were spread out in the grass. That's what I remember. Not claws, not fur. Long pale fingers lying flat, then bending as the hand withdrew. Brent kept his light on that area. Nobody laughed after that. For a few seconds, he kept asking whether we'd arranged it. He thought somebody we knew was hiding out there, and we'd called him over to be the target of a joke. Then the movement started again, farther away. The thing went around us in a wide circle. We couldn't follow all of it. We'd hear grass moving on one side, then a scrape against stone behind us, then a heavier sound toward the trees. There were gaps long enough that I thought it had left. Every time one of us turned toward the exit, something moved near that exit. I'm not claiming it could read our minds. It could see us. We were standing in the open, and we kept looking in the direction we wanted to go. Brent told us to stay together. It was the first useful thing anybody had said. We started toward the road that led back to Main Street. He walked beside us with the flashlight pointed ahead. Heather was between us. I kept looking behind because I was afraid it would use the stones to get close. We'd gone maybe twenty yards when Brent stopped so suddenly that Heather bumped into him. The thing was ahead of us, off the drive to the right. It had risen into a crouch behind a low marker. Most of its body was still hidden, but the upper part of its back and the back of its head were visible. Its head looked too large on its thin neck. There was no hair anywhere I could see. It was facing away from us. That sounds less frightening than it was. It had gone to the trouble of getting in front of us, and now it was sitting there with its back turned. Brent kept the light on it. His hand was shaking enough that the bright part moved across the grass. The thing lowered itself. One long arm reached out beyond the marker. Then it moved farther along the road, stopped, and lifted its head just enough for us to see the back of it again. Heather said she thought it wanted us to follow. I told her not to say that. I didn't want her putting an intention to it. I wanted it to be sick or hurt or confused. I wanted there to be something wrong with it that had nothing to do with us. Brent said we were going back through the park. This time we did it. We turned around as a group and walked quickly toward the entrance we'd come through. I looked back twice. The first time the drive was empty. The second time the pale shape had moved out from behind the marker. It was crouched at the edge of the drive, looking in the direction we'd originally been walking. Even then, it didn't turn toward us. That was the last clear view I got of it that night. Once we reached the park, Heather started running. Brent and I ran with her. We didn't stop until we were back on a residential street, with porch lights on and cars parked along the curb. Brent walked us all the way to her house. Her mom was in the kitchen. She knew immediately that something was wrong. Heather tried to explain while still out of breath. Brent interrupted to say there'd been some strange person out there. That was how we described it to an adult, a person. Her mom checked that nobody had touched us. Then she called someone to report a possible naked man in the cemetery. I don't know whether anyone went out to check that night. Nobody ever contacted me about it. I slept at Heather's that night because neither of us wanted to be alone. We left her bedroom light on. At one point, long after her mom had gone to bed, Heather asked whether I thought it had known which way our houses were. I told her no. I didn't have any reason for saying that. I just needed one of us to say it. We went back once in daylight. People always ask about that too. We weren't trying to find it. Brent wanted to show us that whatever we'd seen would look different during the day. Heather had noticed her hair clip was missing when we got back to her house, so we agreed to retrace the route and look for it. We checked the route through the park first. Once we reached the cemetery, Heather and I stayed on the drive. We never found the clip. The place looked ordinary enough that I started feeling embarrassed. There were no strange holes, no obvious hiding place. Nothing that explained how something that size had stayed out of sight for so long. But there were plenty of places where the stones overlapped from the height of a crouching person. Brent stepped off the drive as far as the marker where we'd last seen it and bent down. Then he stood up again very quickly. He said nothing was there. He didn't offer to demonstrate how a person could have moved the way it had. I tried looking things up when I got home. This was before I had any particular word to search for. Most of what I found was about sick deer, escaped animals, or people doing things in cemeteries that I wish I hadn't read about. None of it described the movement. Eventually, I contacted a paranormal group in Champagne. A man from the group agreed to meet us and take an account of what had happened. Heather and I sat across from him in a public place and told the story while he wrote things down. He didn't act as if he recognized it. He asked sensible questions about distance and lighting and whether we might have frightened an animal. When we explained the hands, he stopped trying to name it. He said he'd document the account. The group never went out to investigate as far as I know. That was the first time I left out the dreams. I'd started having them within a few nights of the sighting. They weren't constant, and I didn't think they were connected at first. I didn't dream about graves or the park. I dreamed about crawling through a narrow space, and I usually woke before much happened. Heather looked at me when the man asked whether we'd noticed anything strange afterward. I said no. She said no too. For a long time, I assumed she'd been looking at me because she knew I was embarrassed. I didn't find out what that look actually meant until much later. The dreams faded over the next several weeks. I finished school. Heather and I stayed friends, but we saw less of each other after I moved. Brent became one of those people whose life I only heard about through someone else. I still thought about the cemetery. I just stopped expecting it to become relevant again. By around 2012, I was living in Aurora, Colorado. That's where I met Derek. We became friends through work. Neither of us was especially outgoing at first, but somebody brought up a supposedly haunted place, and we ended up talking for most of our break. He was interested in the same stuff I was. Strange encounters, local stories, things people couldn't quite explain. He wasn't somebody who believed every claim he heard. That was one of the reasons I like talking to him. I knew him for several months before I told him about Rossville. We were sitting at his kitchen table after dinner. I don't remember what led into it. I started describing the cemetery, and got as far as the way the things legs came forward between its arms. Derek put his drink down. He asked whether it had any hair. I said no. He asked if I had seen the face. I told him I hadn't. Then he got quiet enough that I asked what was wrong. He'd seen something several years earlier while living in Thornton. At the time, he was renting a room in a house with an old wooden front porch. The space underneath wasn't enclosed all the way around. There was a loose section along one side where somebody had apparently worked on something, and never finished covering it. He'd come home late and dropped his keys while getting out his wallet. They fell beside the porch steps, and he bent down to find them. There was something under the porch. His first thought was that a person had crawled underneath to sleep. It was crouched near the open section, knees up, back bent beneath the boards. It was holding something close to its chest. He couldn't tell what. He thought it had been eating because its head moved down toward its hands twice before it noticed him. Derek said the skin was pale in a way that looked unhealthy. He could see the joints through it and there wasn't enough flesh on the arms. It had no visible hair. When it turned, one knee moved sideways without the rest of the body shifting. He stayed bent over with his keys in his hand. The thing looked directly at him. This was where his description became difficult. He said the face was mostly flat. There was a small mouth and two eyes set farther apart than he expected. He couldn't remember a proper nose, just something low in the middle of the face. He didn't describe empty eye sockets or a mouth full of huge teeth. I've heard those things in other accounts, but they weren't what he told me. What bothered him was the expression. There wasn't one. He'd startled a living thing at close range, and it hadn't flinched. It had simply turned to look at him, still holding whatever it had been holding. Derek straightened up and backed away. The thing lowered its hands, leaned forward, and moved deeper under the porch. It stopped after a few feet and looked back. He said that was when he understood it wasn't hiding from him. He didn't follow. He went around to the back of the house and let himself in. From the front room, he could hear weight shifting beneath the porch boards. He called his roommate out to listen. By the time they both stood there, it had stopped. They checked underneath in the morning, there was ordinary rubbish and some loose soil, nothing that explained what he'd seen. Derrick came from a Navajo and Apache background. At the time, he had wondered whether there might be a connection to stories he'd heard growing up, and he had also come across people using the words "Skinwalker and Wendigo" for nearly anything unusual. He wasn't comfortable with either explanation. He said people treated those names as interchangeable when they weren't, and neither one really described his experience. His girlfriend's mother claimed to be a medium. She told him somebody must have woken something up and made it angry. Derrick didn't put much faith in that either. He'd looked for an answer, failed to find one, and eventually stopped bringing it up. Then I sat down at his table and described the same body. We talked until late that night. I mentioned that I'd had a few bad dreams afterward. I didn't describe them. He said he'd had some too, and immediately changed the subject. I noticed, but I let him. That night mine came back. I was on my hands and knees in a low passage. There was packed dirt under me and something solid just above my back. I couldn't lift my head far enough to see more than a few feet ahead. The passage widened a little just before an opening with a dull metal panel hinged along one side. The panel stood open against the left-hand wall of the passage. I had to squeeze past its edge to get through. Beyond it was a concrete room. It wasn't a basement I recognized. The ceiling was low enough that I still couldn't stand. There was a square support in the middle with one corner broken near the floor. To the right, a narrow strip of bare earth separated the floor from the wall. The far side had another opening. There was light beyond that one. Not bright light. Enough that I could see a pale shape crouched just inside it. The crawler had its back to me. It moved forward, toward the light, then stopped and looked over its shoulder. I couldn't make out the face, but I knew it was looking at me. I woke before I reached it. For a few minutes, I was more angry than frightened. We'd spent hours discussing something scary, and then I dreamed about it. That wasn't evidence of anything except my own ability to make myself miserable. I got up, drank some water, and went back to bed. The next dream started closer to the metal panel. The one after that started with my hand already around its edge. I told Derek I was having trouble sleeping. He admitted that he was too. Here of us wanted to make the other worse, so we agreed not to trade details. I know that sounds convenient now, but we weren't conducting an experiment. We were two people who had managed to scare ourselves by talking, and we thought talking more would make it worse. Over the next six months, everything became difficult. When I've mentioned that before, I've called it a period of bad luck. My car needed work I couldn't afford. I had lost hours at his job. I had a minor kitchen leak, turned into an argument with my landlord. There were other small things too. I don't think the creature broke my car or interfered with our paychecks. We were exhausted, distracted, and anxious. Ordinary problems felt enormous. We forgot things. We were short with people. I started dreading the part of the day when I had to decide whether to try sleeping. The dreams were what didn't fit. Mine had the same layout every time. The passage, the open panel, the square support with a broken corner, the opening with light beyond it. Some nights I stayed in the passage. Other nights I crawled into the room. The creature always waited farther ahead. It never came straight at me. It moved a little farther away each time I got close enough to see its shoulders. If I stopped, it stopped. I could hear its skin dragging against the concrete when it changed position. That was usually when I woke. One morning I woke on the floor beside my bed. I'd apparently thrown off the blankets and rolled out. I didn't hurt myself. I didn't think much of it until it happened again. With my knees tucked underneath me and one hand pushed into the space under the bed. After that, I spoke to a doctor. I described the dreams and the apparent movement in my sleep. I left out the cemetery creature because I wanted help sleeping, and I was afraid that part would distract from everything else. We talked about stress, my schedule, and getting further help if the behavior continued. I followed through. I reduced the things I was doing that kept me awake. I stopped reading encounter accounts before bed. I started keeping notes about when I slept and how I felt afterward. Some of it helped. I was less anxious during the day. The room stayed the same. At one point I moved the bed so there was less space beside it. The next morning I woke with both palms against the wall. I started sleeping on the couch. The dreams became less frequent after we stopped discussing the sightings entirely. By the end of that stretch, I could go weeks without one. Derek said his were easing off too, although he looked worse than I did. We went back to being friends who occasionally watched a scary movie and regretted it. We didn't stop knowing what had happened. We just stopped making it the main subject of our lives. That worked for a long time. Years, actually. Which is why, when I finally sent the cemetery account to a podcast, I didn't think I was doing anything dangerous. Before sending it, I called Derek to make sure I had his porch account right. We still kept the dream details to ourselves. I sent the short version. The sighting, the porch story, and a brief mention that Derek and I had experienced unusually intense nightmares after discussing it. I didn't describe the room. Within a week of that conversation with Derek, I was dreaming about it again. But first, I blamed myself for bringing it all back up. I didn't describe the metal panel. I definitely didn't mention waking up with my hand under the bed. The host read my account. Then, several episodes later, another listener sent in a story. I listened to that one at my kitchen counter while putting groceries away. I was holding a container of yogurt when the man described the broken corner of the square support. I put it down without opening the refrigerator. He said he'd seen a pale figure crouched beside a shed on a property he'd been helping clear. It had moved away on all fours, stopped, and looked back at him. He'd gone a few steps after it before realizing how strange the whole situation was and returning to his car. A few nights later, he'd started dreaming about a low concrete room. He described the dirt passage leading into it. He described an open metal panel that he had to turn sideways to get around. Then he described a strip of bare earth along the right-hand wall. I stopped the episode and called Derek. I didn't send him the episode right away. I asked him to write down everything he remembered about his dreams first. He wanted to know why. I told him I'd heard something that scared me, but I didn't want to put details in his head. He did it while I waited on the phone. When he read his description back, I sat down. His room had the same support. The same open panel. The same strip of earth. He'd also noticed a bolt on the passage side of the panel. Something I'd never paid attention to. But he'd gotten farther than I had. He'd crawled all the way across the room and looked through the far opening. The light beyond it came from his own bedroom. He said he'd been looking up at the side of his mattress from floor level. The blanket was hanging down near his face. He could see the leg of his bedside table and a charger plugged into the wall. When he'd felt the thing behind him start moving closer and he'd woken up. Derek said his dreams had also come back after our conversation about the submission. He'd been sleeping with a lamp on for weeks. I hadn't known that. I hadn't known that he'd started pushing storage containers underneath his bed so there wouldn't be an open space there. He listened to the episode after we hung up. Then he called me back and asked whether he could stay at my apartment that night. I said yes before he finished asking. He contacted the podcast through the address I'd used for my submission. I asked whether the other listener would be willing to talk privately. The host checked with him first, and eventually we were put in touch. I'll call him Gavin. He was older than we were, married, and sounded more irritated than excited that other people were going through the same thing. He wasn't interested in starting a group or proving anything publicly. He wanted the dreams to stop. His wife had found him kneeling beside a closet twice. The first time, she'd thought he was looking for something. The second time, he'd had his fingers beneath a small access panel near the floor. They'd lived there for years. He couldn't remember ever opening that panel while he was awake. When she woke him, he'd become upset because for a few seconds, he'd thought she was stopping him from getting out. That bothered me more than the room description. Being out was exactly how it felt in the dream. I wasn't thinking about following a creature. I was trying to reach the light beyond it. I always knew in that questioning way you know things and dreams, that the only safe place was through the far opening. I'd never once wondered why I couldn't go back the way I'd come. Gavin didn't know either. We compared the accounts we'd already written. There were differences. He saw a wider room. Derek remembered a lower ceiling. I couldn't remember whether the panel had a handle or just an edge thick enough to grip. But we all moved through it in the same direction. Derek and Gavin had both seen it stop and look back. In the cemetery, it had kept moving just far enough ahead that we could still see it. For the first three nights Derek stayed with me. He slept on the couch. For the first two, one of us stayed awake while the other slept. We didn't think that would solve anything. We just wanted some rest without waking up halfway underneath furniture. The third night, I fell asleep sitting up while he was sleeping. I dreamed that I was halfway into the concrete room. Derek was near the square support. I recognized his shirt before I recognized him. He was on his hands and knees with his face turned toward the far opening. I tried to get his attention, but my mouth wouldn't do what I wanted. It wasn't the usual feeling of being unable to speak in a nightmare. My tongue felt physically crowded, as if I had clenched my teeth around it. He looked back once. I remember how relieved he appeared. Then something pale moved above him. The crawler was pressed against the ceiling. I hadn't looked up before. There wasn't enough room to lift my head properly, and all my attention had been on the light ahead. But from where I was, I could see an arm extended along the concrete, and a knee braced against the top of the support. Its body was almost directly over Derek. Its head turned upside down to look at me. I woken the chair with my jaw aching. Derek was awake on the couch. He was staring at me. Before I could say anything, he asked why I hadn't answered him. We stayed up for the rest of the night. I don't know what would count as proof to someone who wasn't there. I know people can influence each other's memories, particularly when they're frightened. But I had written that I'd seen him near the support before he told me where he'd been. He had written that he saw me coming through the panel before I told him how my dream started. We put the two accounts beside each other on the kitchen table. Neither of us wanted to read them again. I called Heather the next morning. We still spoke a few times a year, and I had mentioned that I'd sent the old story to a podcast. She thought I was calling about that. I asked whether she'd ever had strange dreams after the cemetery. She was quiet for several seconds. Then she asked whether I meant the place with the low ceiling. I started crying. I hadn't cried about any of it up to that point. I'd been scared, tired, angry, embarrassed. Hearing her say that did something different. It took away the last explanation I'd been using to get through the day. Heather hadn't listened to the podcast. She hadn't talked to Derek or Gavin, and she'd been in the room years before I knew either of them. She told me she'd dreamed about it for a few weeks after the cemetery. In hers, the creature kept moving ahead of her, away from the way she'd come in. She thought it was showing her a way out. Then one night, she'd gotten her sleeve caught on the open metal panel. She'd pulled backward to free herself. That movement had turned her toward the passage behind her. For the first time she'd realized there was enough room to go back. The creature had reacted. It had come toward her so fast that she'd fallen onto her side. She'd pushed herself into the passage and swung the metal panel closed between them. Something had hit the other side while she was still holding it. There was a sliding bolt on her side. She'd forced it across. Then she'd woken up. She never had that dream again. When I asked why she hadn't told me, she reminded me of the interview with the paranormal group. I'd said nothing else had happened. She'd assumed her dreams were something private and embarrassing that had only happened to her. After they stopped, she didn't want to start them again by talking about them. I understood that better than I wanted to. I told her everything. She offered to come out. At first, I said she didn't have to. Then I looked at Derek sitting at my kitchen table, asleep with his head propped against one hand, and I stopped pretending that we were managing it. Heather arranged a visit. We weren't waiting for her so we could conduct some elaborate test. I wanted somebody I trusted who had been through it and gotten out. Derek wanted somebody who could stay awake for longer than either of us could. Before she arrived, things got worse. I woke one evening in the armchair and saw a figure crouched in the hall outside my bedroom. For a second, I thought it was Derek. He wasn't moving. His forehead was almost touching the floor. I thought he was asleep again. Then I saw his bare arm on the couch beside me. Derek was still there under a blanket. Whatever was in the hall had the same pale, hairless back I'd seen between the stones. It was folded down so low that its ribs almost touched its thighs. Both hands were flat on the floor. Its head was turned toward my bedroom. I couldn't get up at first. I kept looking from it to Derek, trying to understand how both could be there. The thing lifted one hand. The fingers stayed bent while the arm rose. The palm turned toward me, and for a second I could see pale creases running across it. Then it put the hand farther into the bedroom and dragged the rest of itself after it. It's hips narrowed as it passed the doorframe. I don't mean it turned sideways. The body itself seemed to draw inward. I could hear skin rubbing against the lower part of the frame. Derek made a strained sound in his sleep. I fell out of the chair trying to reach him. I shook his shoulder hard enough that he woke angry. The hall was empty. I didn't go into the bedroom until he'd put his shoes on and come with me. There was nothing beneath the bed, nothing in the closet. There were four wet marks on the hallway floor where the hand had rested. By the time we had argued about what they meant, they had begun drying. Derek said he'd been looking into my bedroom when I woke him. He hadn't been dreaming about his own apartment anymore. That was the first time I seriously considered leaving everything I owned and getting as far away as I could. But Derek had dreamed about the room in more than one home. Gavin had done it while staying with relatives. Whatever connection existed wasn't limited to an address. I still went to a hotel with Derek that night. I needed to be somewhere with other people nearby. We took turns sleeping for a few hours at a time. We came back only after Heather arrived. She hugged me, looked at Derek, and asked which one of us had slept most recently. That was how she handled it. No dramatic questions. No theories about what we'd awakened. She made food, sat with us, and insisted we take turns lying down while she stayed in the room. We told Gavin what she'd remembered. We were careful about that because if it was only a nightmare, we might be giving him an ending his brain could use. At that point, I would have been happy with that explanation. His wife agreed to stay with him while he slept. The following afternoon, he called. He'd gone back. He said getting past the open panel had been harder than he expected. The creature had come after him. He'd caught the edge of the panel with his heel, turned, and pushed it closed. The bolt was stiff. He'd had to use both hands. When it finally slid across, the pressure against the other side stopped. He woke before his wife tried to wake him. He sounded different on the phone. Still exhausted, but present in a way he hadn't been before. He'd slept several more hours afterward without dreaming about the room. I wanted to feel relieved. Instead, I kept thinking about how quickly the thing had moved when Heather turned around. We weren't trying to find a secret word or perform a ritual. We were trying to leave a place that something had spent years training us to move farther into. And now we knew it wouldn't let us turn around quietly. It took two more attempts to understand how hard leaving would be. The first time I tried, the creature was between me and the panel before I could turn around properly. I woke with my legs kicking against the couch cushions. Derek tried the following afternoon. He got as far as the square support before something pale came down from above it and blocked the passage. After woke him because he'd stopped breathing normally. Afterward, we sat at the kitchen table and talked about the time we'd seen each other there. Neither of us wanted to go to sleep at the same time again. But when we'd been together, we'd at least been able to recognize each other. Going in alone hadn't worked. We agreed to try once with Heather watching us. If either of us seemed to be in trouble, she'd wake us both. I don't want to make that sound organized or clever. We were tired people trying something because two other people said they'd gotten out that way. We didn't know whether closing the panel would help both of us, whether we could even find each other again, or what Heather might have to deal with while we were asleep. She knew that too. She still stayed. We moved the coffee table out of the way. Derek lay on the couch. And I stretched out on the floor beside it with a pillow and blanket. Heather pulled her chair close to my head, where she could reach my shoulder and Derek's arm. It was early afternoon. The curtains were open, and I could hear a neighbor doing something in the stairwell. I remember watching Heather's hands while she folded a paper napkin into smaller squares. Then I was in the concrete room. I was beside the square support. My left knee was pressed against its broken corner, and Derek was farther ahead of me, turned toward the light. The metal panel was behind us. I could see it if I twisted far enough. It was still folded against the wall, still open. Closing it had ended Heather's dreams and gavans, but it hadn't ended ours. Whatever that meant, we still had to get ourselves back into the passage. The crawler was above the entrance. Both hands were pressed against the ceiling, with its elbows bent away from its body. Its legs were drawn up beside its chest. There wasn't enough space up there for it to be positioned that way, but it was. It had turned its face downward. For the first time, I saw it properly. The eyes were pale and wet. There were darker centers, but they didn't move together. One was directed toward Derek. The other was looking at me. The mouth was small and partly open. I could see something moving just behind the lips. Its chest didn't rise. I stayed completely still. Derek looked at me. Then he looked toward the panel. The creature lowered one arm. It understood where we wanted to go. I don't know how long we stayed like that. Time in those dreams never made much sense. It could have been seconds. It felt much longer. The thing moved its hand along the ceiling until it was directly above the support. Its fingers bent around the upper edge. Derek shifted backward. The mouth opened a little farther. I looked toward the light at the far end of the room. From where I was, I could see the edge of my living room rug beyond it. I could also see Heather's shoe. She seemed only a few feet away in a room I knew. I wanted to crawl straight toward her, even with that thing above us. That was what it had been offering all along. A view of somewhere safe, with itself waiting along the way. I started crawling toward the light. Derek caught my sleeve. I pulled free, not because I wanted to leave him, but because I didn't know how else to make the thing move away from the entrance behind us. I couldn't explain. My mouth was doing the same awful thing it had done before. I kept my eyes on the opening. The crawler moved. It released the ceiling and came down beside me with its limbs folding around the support. I felt air move against my face. It was close enough that I could see dirt caught in the creases of its neck. Then it went ahead of me. Just a few feet. It turned its head to check that I was following. Behind me, Derek moved toward the panel. I kept going until I could see more of the living room. Heather had stood up. Her shoe moved out of view, and the blanket beside my sleeping body shifted. The creature stopped between me and the opening. Its hands were together near its chest. I thought of Derek bending beside the porch, watching it hold something. Then it leaned forward, and I saw my own bare ankle beyond the opening. The thing was reaching toward it. I turned around. I scraped my knee hard against the concrete and nearly fell. Derek was at the entrance, half in the dirt passage, with one arm extended toward me. The crawler hit the floor behind me. I didn't look back. There wasn't enough room to get upright. I pushed with my feet and dragged myself forward on my forearms. My shirt caught on the broken corner of the support. I pulled until it tore free. Derek got hold of my arm. Something closed around my ankle. There was no sharp pain at first. Just pressure, followed by the awful certainty that I couldn't move that leg any farther. Derek pulled harder. My knee slid across the concrete. I got one hand around the edge of the open metal panel and pulled with him. The grip on my ankle loosened for a second. I kicked backward. My heel struck something firm and smooth. The hand let go. Derek dragged me clear of the frame. In the wider part of the passage, he pressed against one wall while I twisted onto my back with my feet toward the opening. He swung the panel shut. It stopped with a forearm still through the gap. The hand opened beside my knee. I pressed myself against the dirt wall, while the fingers spread and reached for my leg. The skin wasn't cold white anymore. Up close, it was uneven and faintly yellow around the joints. Derek shoved the panel against the arm. The hand bent at the wrist and reached farther in. I drew my legs back before it could get hold of me again. Then planted both feet against the metal beside its arm and pushed. The arm flattened in the gap. I felt something give. The fingers closed. The hand slid backward and the panel struck its frame hard enough that I felt it through both legs. Derek held it shut with his shoulder while I took my feet down and turned onto my side. I reached past him and searched for the bolt. It was down near the lower edge, close to the dirt. I could barely fit my fingers around it. The thing hit the other side. The panel jolted against Derek's shoulder. I pulled the bolt sideways, it shifted a little and stopped. Derek was saying something. I could see his mouth moving. I couldn't hear him over the metal grinding against its frame. I tried again. The bolt was lower than the hole it needed to enter. That was all. There wasn't another rule we hadn't learned. It wasn't waiting for us to say something. The panel had dropped slightly on its hinges and the bolt didn't line up. I caught Derek's wrist and pushed his hand toward the bottom edge. He understood. He lifted the panel while I worked the bolt with both hands. It scraped across the frame. Then it went in. The pressure stopped immediately. Derek stayed against the panel. I kept holding the bolt. We waited for another impact. None came. There was no victory feeling. I was still waiting for the door to open when I became aware of Heather's hand on my shoulder. I woke on my living room floor. Derek was sitting upright on the couch, making a rough six sound. Heather had one hand on him and one on me. The lamp from the side table was broken on the floor. I tried to get up but my right ankle hurt. There were pale pressure marks around it that darkened over the next several hours. Heather hadn't touched that ankle. For a while, none of us could give a clear account of what had happened. We got into the kitchen because nobody wanted to stay beside the couch. Heather held a glass of water with both hands. Derek kept rubbing his shoulder. When she could talk about it, she told us what she'd seen. We'd been asleep for less than 20 minutes when my blanket started moving toward the gap beneath the couch. At first, she'd thought I was pulling it in my sleep. Then she'd seen a hand coming out from underneath and closing around my ankle. She reached for my shoulder, but the thing pulled its head and shoulders out and turned toward her. She flinched backward into the side table. She called our names. Neither of us responded. She grabbed the lamp and threw it. The grip on my ankle loosened, but its other hand stayed planted on the floor between us. She was trying to reach around it when that hand suddenly folded under its arm. Then the whole creature jerked backward beneath the couch. So quickly that she thought someone behind it must have pulled it. She said that part took only a few seconds. There was nobody behind it. The couch was against the wall. As soon as it disappeared, Heather dropped beside us and shook us both awake. We moved the couch together after we'd calmed down enough. There was dust beneath it and a tear in the thin fabric along the bottom. The frame was intact. There was nowhere for a person to fit. We left the apartment for the rest of that day. Derek and I got checked because of the bruising and the way we'd been moving in our sleep. I had a strained ankle. He had a bruised shoulder. We described the movements in our sleep and the injuries. We couldn't explain much beyond that in a way that made sense. Heather stayed for another week. The first night afterward, Derek slept for nearly 10 hours. I woke a few times because I expected to be somewhere else. Every time I was in bed. I didn't dream about the room. Neither did he. Gavin kept in touch. His dreams stopped after he closed the panel and his wife never found him at the closet again. Heather hasn't had another one since she was in high school. She also got in touch with Brent. He remembered the cemetery well enough that he didn't want to discuss it at first. When she asked about dreams though, he said he'd never experienced anything like the room. I don't know why it happened to some of us and not him. I'm glad it didn't. I can't tell you why we saw the same place. Why it appeared in different places. Or whether what happened to Gavin involved the exact same creature. I've gone through more explanations. than I can count. Interdimensional was the word I used for a while because the room didn't seem to belong anywhere we could physically get to. That's still a guess. I also don't think we killed it. But we ended whatever access it had to us. It's been more than four years. Derek still comes over for dinner. Heather and I talk more often now. I can sleep in a dark room, and I don't move furniture to block the spaces underneath it. I went back to Rossville for a visit last year. Heather and I went for a walk in the afternoon. When we reached the road toward the park, she asked which way I wanted to go. We stayed on the sidewalk and went back through town. We didn't need to check whether something was still waiting in the cemetery. We didn't need to prove we'd stopped being afraid. For years, I thought the only way I'd ever feel better was to find out what we'd seen. It turned out I could live without that answer. I needed to stop waking up there, and I have. [BLANK_AUDIO]