Just Creepy: Scary Stories - Cabin in the Woods Horror Stories for a Sleepless Night

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

These are Cabin in the Woods Horror Stories for a Sleepless NightLinktree: https://linktr.ee/its_just_creepyStory Credits:►Sent in to https://www.justcreepy.net/Timestamps:00:00 Intro00:00:18 Story 100:11:46 Story 2Music by:►'Decoherence' by Scott Buckley - released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.auBusiness inquiries: ►[e-mail]#scarystories #horrorstories #deepwoods #cabininthewoods 💀As always, thanks for watching! 💀

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It matters where you stay. Hilton for this day. I am writing this to create a permanent record of the events that took place between November 14th and November 17th. I have already given a statement to the Lake County Sheriff's Department, but I omitted several details, because I wanted them to actually investigate the property rather than dismiss me as mentally unstable. I am not looking for advice. I am not looking for paranormal theories. I just need to put these events in order while my memory is still clear.

to verify to myself that this happened. A little background is necessary to understand why we were there. My grandfather passed away in August. He was a quiet man who spent the better part of the last 30 years living alone in a cabin about 40 miles north of Eli, Minnesota. I was the sole beneficiary of his estate, which mostly consisted of a 98 Ford truck, and this property. The cabin sits on 40 acres of dense pine forest,

accessible only by a single dirt logging road that hasn't been maintained in a decade. My intention was to assess the property, clean out his personal effects, and list it for sale. I asked three people to come with me, my younger brother, Elias, my brother-in-law Mark, and my college friend David, who works in construction and agreed to help me inspect the foundation. We arrived on Thursday afternoon. The drive took longer than expected because the logging road was washed out in several places, forcing us to park the truck a mile from the cabin and hike in with our gear. It was cold, hovering around freezing, with a gray, flat sky that promised snow.

The cabin was a standard single-story structure made of rough-hewn logs, with a metal roof and a stone chimney. When we unlocked the front door, the first thing I noticed was the smell. It didn't smell like an old man's house, or like mildew. It smelled like wet copper and ozone. similar to the air after a heavy lightning storm. We spent the first few hours settling in. There was no electricity,

so we relied on a propane generator my grandfather had rigged up in the shed. David did a perimeter check and noted that the wood on the south side of the cabin felt spongy, suggesting rot, though he couldn't find any visible water damage. We made dinner, drank a few beers, and went to bed early. The first occurrence happened at 3.15 a.m. on 4.5. Friday. I woke up because the temperature in the cabin had dropped significantly. I could see my breath in the air. I assumed the fire had died down, so I got out of my sleeping bag to check the wood stove. The main room was empty. Elias and Mark were asleep in the bunk room, and David was on the

pull-out couch. As I reached for a log, I heard a sound coming from the front porch. It was a rhythmic, wet, thumping noise. It sounded like a large distinctive weight being dropped on the wooden planks, dragged and dropped again. Thump, drag, thump, drag. I went to the window. The glass was old and warped, distorting the view, but the moon was bright enough to see the outline of the porch. There was nothing there. The noise stopped the moment I looked out. I stood there for ten minutes, waiting. When I turned back to the stove, the noise started again, this time from the roof. It was heavy. The footsteps were slow and deliberate, traversing the length of the metal roof from the back of the cabin to the front directly over my head. I woke David. He is a pragmatic guy, not prone to flights of

fancy. He listened for about 30 seconds. When the footsteps stopped directly above the chimney, he grabbed his flashlight and the firearm we had brought, a 45 handgun meant for bears. We went outside. There was nothing on the roof. There were no tracks in the frost on the ground. We checked the generator shed. It was locked and undisturbed. We dismissed it as a loose branch or an animal, though neither of us truly believed a raccoon could sound that heavy. On Saturday, the atmosphere changed. We spent the morning clearing out my grandfather's bedroom. It was sparse, just a bed, a dresser, and a small desk. In the desk drawers, I found his journals. They weren't diaries in the traditional sense. They were logs. He recorded the weather,

the temperature, and the local wildlife. The entries from the last two years were different. The handwriting became jagged, harder to read. He stopped recording numbers and started recording descriptions of the mimicry. October 4th, it tried the deer today. The legs were wrong. Too many joints. I shot it, but it didn't bleed. It just dissolved into the slush.

November 12th. It knows my voice. I heard myself calling from the tree line. I must stay inside. I showed the journals to Elias. He laughed it off, suggesting our grandfather had gone senile in his isolation. I wanted to believe him.

But then David called us outside to look at the woodshed. The woodshed is a simple three-walled structure about 20 yards from the main house. David pointed to the back wall. The logs weren't just rotting. They were fusing. The wood grain was swirling in a pattern that looked biological. It looked like muscle fiber. When David poked it with his knife, a thick, dark sap oozed out.

It didn't smell like pine pitch. It smelled like the copper scent from the first day. We decided to leave on Sunday morning. The mood was tense. None of us said it out loud, but we all felt like we were being watched. The silence in the woods was absolute. No birds, no wind, no squirrels. Just a heavy, oppressive stillness.

Saturday night is when the situation escalated beyond explanation. We were sitting in the main room playing cards, trying to ignore the feeling of dread. The generator was humming outside. suddenly the lights flared bright white and then popped leaving us in darkness the generator sputtered and died mark went to the window to see if the generator had run out of fuel he froze sam he said his voice very quiet come here i went to the window standing at the edge of the clearing right where the light from the cabin would have ended was a figure it was wearing a red flannel jacket and jeans it was facing away from us looking into the The trees. Is that... Is that me?

Elias asked from behind my shoulder. The figure was wearing Elias's jacket. The same one Elias was currently wearing in the living room. We watched as the figure slowly turned around. It didn't turn at the waist. Its entire body rotated on the spot like a mannequin on a turntable. The face was blank. I don't mean it was expressionless.

I mean it was smooth skin. No eyes, no nose, no mouth. just a slate of flesh where a face should be. Then it began to change. The flesh rippled. Indentations formed. Within ten seconds it had molded a nose and a mouth. Then eyes.

It looked exactly like Elias, but the expression was slack, dead. It opened its mouth and a sound came out that I will never forget. It wasn't a scream. It was Elias's voice. Speaking the sentence Elias had said five minutes ago at the card table, I think I'm going to fold on this one. The voice was perfect, but the cadence was flat.

It repeated the phrase again, louder. I think I'm going to fold on this one. Then, another figure stepped out of the woods. This one was wearing my clothes. It had my face. It looked at the Elias thing and said, in my voice, pass me a beer. We backed away from the window. David racked the slide on the handgun.

We are leaving, he said. right now. We didn't pack. We grabbed the keys and the flashlights. We bolted out the back door, away from the figures in the front clearing. We ran through the snow, heading toward where we parked the truck. It was a mile hike in the pitch black. About halfway to the truck, we realized the woods were not empty. To my left, I heard Mark's voice whisper, Sam, wait up. But Mark was running right next to me, breathing hard. To my right, I heard David yelling. Bear, bear. But the real David was silent, gripping the gun, leading the way. The forest was full of our voices. Fragments of conversations we'd had over the last two days were being played

back to us from the darkness, overlapping, changing pitch, surrounding us. It wasn't just sounds. I saw shapes in the peripheral beam of my flashlight. Trees that seemed to bend and snap into the shape of human limbs before stiffening back into wood when I looked directly at them. We reached the truck. I have never fumbled with keys so much in my life. As I unlocked the doors, I looked back down the logging road. Standing about 50 feet away, illuminated by the red glow of the truck's taillights, was a group of four men. They were us. They were standing in a line, holding hands. They were smiling. Their mouths were too wide, stretching further, than human jaws allow.

I got the truck started. I didn't wait for everyone to buckle up. I drove in reverse for a hundred yards until I could turn around. And then I drove faster than a safe on a dirt road. I didn't look in the rearview mirror. We didn't stop until we reached a gas station in Ely. We sat in the harsh fluorescent light of the parking lot for an hour without speaking. That was three months ago.

I hired a private contractor to burn the cabin down. I told him it was condemned in structure. unsound. I paid him double to do it without asking questions and to bulldoze the debris into the foundation. He sent me a photo of the fire. It's gone. But here is the satisfying part, if you can call it that. We are safe. The thing, whatever it was, seemed bound to that land. It didn't follow us. I haven't heard the voices since. However, there is a lingering detail that makes me write this tonight. Last week, I went to dinner with Elias. He's been handling it well, mostly by refusing to talk about it. We were eating, and he was telling a story about his work. He laughed at

his own joke. For a split second, just a microsecond, his face lagged. His laugh continued for a fraction of a second after his face had returned to a neutral expression. It was like watching a video with bad audio sync. He didn't notice. I didn't say anything. I know my brother is my brother. We have memories that the thing in the woods couldn't possibly know. But every time I look at him now, I find myself looking for the seams. I find myself wondering if we really made it to the truck in time, or if one of us was swapped out in the dark and is just waiting for the right moment to drop the mask. I am selling the land to the state for conservation. No one will build there again. I'm done.

Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right. Kayak, got that right.

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Dude, look at this place. And it was this dark little cabin buried in pine somewhere in northern Idaho, way up near the Canadian border. I remember scrolling through the pictures on my lunch break. There was a shot of the cabin from the driveway with a wall of trees behind it, another from the frozen-looking lake a few hundred yards away, and a couple interior shots, wood stove, antlers on the wall, bunk beds, old couch. The description bragged about being truly off-grid, with no-wify, limited cell service,

and 40 acres of private forest. At the time, that sounded amazing, just wood, snow, and silence. No work calls, no notifications, no responsibilities except making sure the fire didn't go out. Two weeks, I texted him. That's a long time, man. Exactly, he wrote back. We get there, we decompress, drink, tromp around in the snow, maybe ice fish or something. When's the last time you actually relaxed? I couldn't answer that, and that's basically how I ended up saying yes.

We flew into Spokane, rented a gray Subaru with snow tires, and started driving north. Spokane turned into little towns, which turned into fewer gas stations, which turned into a whole. whole lot of nothing but bare trees and snow banks. By the time we crossed into Idaho officially, the sky was this solid, dull sheet of gray. It wasn't storming exactly, but the clouds felt low, pressing down. You know that weird effect where the world feels quieter when it's about to snow. It already had that. We hit Sandpoint, then kept going, following the directions the host had sent, up Highway 95, left onto some smaller highway, then right onto an even smaller one. Every few miles, we'd see these handmade signs pointing toward lake cabins and snowmobile

rentals, half buried in drifts. So you seriously check the weather? I asked at one point watching the plow truck ahead of us spray snow in a dirty arc. Ryan laughed. Yeah, man, just normal winter up here. The listing said the driveway might need a shovel if it dumps, but they keep the main road plowed. The last real town we passed was one of those blink and you misses. at places. There was a gas station, a bar with a neon moose in the window, and a hardware store. We stopped at the gas station to top off and buy extra firewood and a couple more propane canisters, just in case. The cashier was a guy in his 60s with a gray beard and a trucker hat. He rang us up while the small TV behind him played some hunting show. You boys staying up at the lake, he asked.

Yeah, Ryan said. Cabin a couple miles off the main road. owner said it's tucked back from everything. Two weeks, I added, for some reason. I still remember hearing myself say it and feeling weirdly self-conscious. The guy's eyes flicked up at us at that. Two weeks, huh? He said, like that was an unusual amount of time. Yeah, Ryan said again.

We wanted a real break. The guy just nodded, took our cash and slid the coins back. Watch the weather, he said. They're saying we might get a big one in a few days. Bad time to be stuck somewhere you can't walk out of. We've got a Subaru, Ryan joked. These things are invincible. The old guy didn't smile.

Snow doesn't care what you drive, he said. And don't go wandering too far from the cabin at night. People get turned around in those woods when it's coming down, and they don't always get found. He said it casually, but there was something clipped in his tone that stuck with me. Outside, as we loaded the wood into the car, Ryan rolled his eyes. Smalltown horror movie warning, check, he said. We are officially in the opening act.

Shut up, I said, but I was smiling. The directions got weird after that. We left the highway onto a paved road that turned to packed snow. Then after a few miles we turned again, this time onto a narrow road that technically still had a name, but looked more like a driveway that never ended. Tall pines crowded in, their lower brand. branches heavy with snow. The Subaru's headlights were on even though it was mid-afternoon,

and the light in front of us felt kind of swallowed. Look at this, Ryan said, slowing as the road started to twist. Tell me this isn't perfect. I'll admit it was pretty. The kind of pretty that it'd be on a calendar, white snow, dark trees, the occasional glimpse of a frozen creek off to the side where the ice was dusted with powder like frosting. We'd been following that road for maybe ten minutes when we saw him for the first time. We rounded a slow curve and came into a straighter stretch of road with an embankment on the right side and a shallow dip down to the trees on the left. I was staring out at the woods, half spaced out, when something vertical that wasn't a tree registered in my peripheral vision. Hey, slow down, I said automatically.

My brain needed a second to catch up to my eyes. What, Ryan said, but he eased off the gas. I turned in my seat. There was a man standing down the slope to our left, just beyond the break where the trees started. He was far enough off the road that the details were hazy, but close enough that I knew I was looking at a person and not a stump. He stood perfectly still, not hunched like he was cold, not shifting his weight, just there, facing the road, facing us. Do you see that? I asked. Ryan glanced over.

By then we were passing him. angle changing, the trees starting to slice between us. Oh yeah, he said, creepy, Hunter maybe? I twisted in my seat, trying to keep him in view through the rear window as we rolled by. The guy never moved. He had on something dark, maybe a coat, maybe a hoodie, and maybe a hat, though it might have just been the way his head looked against the trees. His arms hung straight down at his sides. Maybe he's ice fishing, Ryan said. There's supposed to be some little ponds around here. There's no pond, I said.

He's just standing there. Ryan glanced again. Well, we passed him. Welcome to rural Idaho, man. People just do their thing. I kept watching until the curve of the road hid the spot completely. I remember this tiny note of relief when I couldn't see him anymore, which didn't make sense. It's not like he was doing anything, but that's how it started.

Just a guy in the trees, off in the distance, watching as our car was. went by. The driveway to the cabin was basically a tunnel through the woods. The listing hadn't exaggerated how tucked away it was. There was a little green sign with the address on it, and after that the world just turned into snow and branches. It had probably been plowed a couple days earlier, but a new layer had fallen since, so the ruts were soft. The Subaru slipped once or twice, and we had to lean forward like our combined weight was going to help. Then the trees opened up and the cabin appeared, hunched in a little clearing like it had grown there instead of being built. It was dark brown, with a steep roof and a covered porch. The smoke from the

chimney went straight up into the gray sky. Nice, Ryan said, pulling up next to the porch. Hell yeah. I climbed out into the kind of cold that bites your nostrils. My breath billowed out like I was smoking. The snow out past the immediate clearing came up almost to my knees where it wasn't packed. There was no other house, no shed, no neighbors, just trees. The cabin door was unlocked like the host had promised. Inside, it was warmer but not by much. We cranked up the wood stove and the little propane heater, dumped our bags on the couch, and did that first excited lap around the place. It was small, main room with the stove and kitchen, a tiny bathroom, and a bedroom in the back with a queen bed and a set of bunk beds.

There were snowshoes by the door, a couple mismatched mugs in the cupboard, and a drawer full of random cabin stuff, playing cards, batteries, matches. On the little table near the door there was a spiral-bound guest book with a pen tied to it. The front page had a welcome note from the host, with a hand-drawn little smiley face next to Enjoy the Silence. I flipped through the pages, reading bits of what other people had written. mostly normal stuff. Great place, got engaged here, saw a moose by the lake.

Beautiful in summer, we'll be back. About halfway through though, there was an entry that just said, stayed three days, had to leave early. We kept seeing the same guy in the trees. There was no date, no signature, just that one sentence, scribbled sharper than the others like the person had been in a hurry. Check this out, I said, turning the book to show Ryan. He read it, smirked, and did a little spooky voice.

Oh, the forest man, watcher of the Airbnb's. Shut up, I said again. But I was thinking of the guy by the road. We unpacked, opened a couple beers, and got the fire really going. By the time the sun went down, which felt early up there, the cabin was the coziest place on earth. The windows were just black rectangles with snow piled on the sills. reflecting the orange light from the stove.

At some point, after cards and a couple more beers, we killed the overhead light and just sat there in the firelight, listening to the wood crackle and the wind push against the walls. It was the first time in a long time I didn't feel any pull toward my phone or my laptop. There was no Wi-Fi, no bar of service, nothing. The world outside might as well have not existed. I'm glad we did this, Ryan said. Yeah, I said, and meant it. I didn't look out the window much that first night. When I did,

all I saw was our own faint reflection in the shape of the snow beyond. If somebody had been standing at the tree line, watching the cabin, I wouldn't have been able to see them anyway. The first weird thing I can't explain happened the next morning. I woke up to that particular kind of quiet you only get when everything is covered in snow. Ryan was still passed out, snoring softly. I pulled on my boots and jacket and stepped out onto the porch to take a piss and get some fresh air. The sky had that pale, overcast light again. It had snowed a little during the night, dusting the porch and railings. I stepped down onto the packed area in front of the cabin, and immediately noticed that the

surface wasn't smooth. Footprints, they were all around the cabin. Not a mess, not random. One clean set of prints circling the cabin in a slow, methodical line, about six or six, seven feet out from the walls, with a long stride between each track. No prints leading toward the cabin, no prints leading away. Just a single ring, as if someone had appeared out of nowhere, walked a perfect slow circle around the cabin while we slept, and then vanished. The hair on my arms stood up. The prints were sharp and deep, like whoever had made them was fairly heavy, and had been there not too long ago. The snow that had fallen on top of them was barely a dusting. Ryan, I called my breath steaming in front of me.

Dude, come look at this. He stumbled out a minute later, wrapped in a hoodie and holding a mug of coffee. What's up? I pointed. Footprints. He followed the trail with his eyes walking along inside the ring. Could be the owner, he said, checking the place. Why would he do that in the middle of the night? Maybe it wasn't the middle of the night.

Maybe you just slept hard, or he came early this morning. I shook my head. There are no footprints to or from the driveway. Look, we walked around the cabin together, following the prince. The driveway was on the east side. The prince never came from that direction. They also never went toward the tree line. They just circled.

All the way around. One continuous path. The only break was at the front porch, where the line came closer, then veered back out again, like whoever it was had stepped in to inspect the door, and then returned to their loop. Ryan made a low, huh sound,

his breath curling out. Yeah, that's weird, he admitted. But there was probably other snow before this man. Maybe they were out here yesterday afternoon while we were still driving. The wind can cover stuff fast. Then why are these so clear, I asked. He didn't have an answer.

After a second, he shrugged. We're in the woods. People walk around, hunters, snowmobilers, whoever. We're not in a horror movie. Let it go. We finished our coffee, and eventually the normal appeal of the place washed over the weirdness again. We spent the day tromping out to the lake, frozen except for a dark patch near a little inlet,

throwing snowballs and trying out the snowshoes the host had left. It really was beautiful. There were moments where the only sound was our breathing, and the squeak of packed snow underfoot, where you could look around and see nothing human in any direction. The whole time, though, I kept glancing at the edges of the clearing. At the point where the trees started, way out past the lake. At the bend in the driveway where we couldn't see the road, but knew it was there. Every so often, I'd feel that prickling sensation between my shoulder blades like someone was watching us.

I'd turn, squinting, nothing, just dark trunks and white ground in the occasional sagging branch. The second time we saw him, it was almost sunset. We were coming back from the lake, tired and a little out of breath, when Ryan stopped walking so abruptly that I ran into his back. What? I said. He didn't answer. He just nodded toward the tree line on the far side of the clearing, off to our right.

It took me a moment to pick him out. He was standing half behind a tree, just beyond where the land sloped down. Same distance as before, roughly. Same stillness. Watching. I couldn't make out his face. He was just this vertical shape. darker than the trees.

Coat, hat, maybe, arms at his sides. Okay, that's creepy, Ryan said quietly. Maybe it's the owner, I said, echoing him from the morning, or a neighbor. Then why doesn't he just come say hi, Ryan asked. We stood there for a full minute, our breath fogging between us, staring. The man didn't move. If he was a person and not some kind of weird scarecrow, he had to be freezing. Hey, Ryan shouted finally lifting one arm. You okay?

His voice bounced off the trees and came back thin and flat. The figure didn't respond, didn't wave, didn't shift, nothing. Dude, I muttered my heartbeat picking up. Stop. Hey, Ryan shouted again. Do you need something? The man didn't move. Then the wind gusted.

A swirl of powder lifted off the snow, and when it settled, he was gone. There were trees where he'd been. Trunks and branches and shadows, but no man. We both stared, blinking. He just walked away, Ryan said, but he didn't sound convinced. We'd have seen him, I said. There was no cover for him to move behind except trees that were as thin as everything else. We took our eyes off him for like half a second.

Well, Ryan said, forcing a laugh that came out too loud. He's fast. Good for him. Let's get inside. My feet are numb. We went back into the cabin, tracking snow onto the rug. We didn't say much while we took off our boots and jackets. The silence that had felt peaceful before now felt heavy, like it was listening. That night, I woke up to the sound of crunching snow.

It was slow and deliberate. Crunch, pause, crunch. Like someone walking carefully around the cabin. Ryan was a dead weight in the bed above me on the bunk. I lay there, holding my breath, listening. The wood stove had burned down, and the cabin was colder now. Every sound seemed magnified. Crunch.

The sound was right outside the wall to my left, which would have put it near the bathroom window. It was so clear I could almost feel the vibration through the old wood. I swung my legs out of the bunk, wincing when the floor creaked. The walking stopped for maybe two seconds, then started again, closer to the front of the cabin. I moved slowly through the dark, trying not to bang my shins on anything, until I reached the main room. The glass of the window was black, reflecting my pale face faintly. My breath fogged it up more. Crunch. Whatever it was, it was right by the porch now. I should have flipped on the outside light. I don't know why I didn't. Something about breaking that darkness felt wrong.

Like if I lit it up, I'd see something I didn't want to see. Instead, I edged to the side of the window, pressed my cheek to the cold log wall, and tried to look out from the corner so I wouldn't be directly in front of the glass. For a second, I didn't see anything, just snow, the vague line of the porch railing, and the faint white glow of the sky. Then my eyes adjusted and I saw a shape on the far edge of the clearing. He was standing out beyond the drive, where the ground dipped down toward the trees. farther away than I expected given how loud the footsteps had been, but still there.

Still facing the cabin. He'd somehow moved from the bathroom wall to that spot in the time it took me to walk ten steps. My skin broke out in goosebumps. I couldn't see a face, but I could see that his head was tilted just slightly, like he was curious, or listening. I don't know how long I stood there watching, long enough for my toes to go numb, my jaw to start to ache from clenching. At some point, the footsteps started again, faint and out of sync with what I was seeing, like the sound and the image weren't connected. Crunch, crunch,

but the figure didn't move. Then, as if someone had flipped a switch, the footsteps stopped and the figure was gone. One blink he was there, the next he wasn't. I backed away from the window, heart hammering. For a second I thought about waking Ryan, but what was I going to to show him, an empty patch of snow? Instead, I threw a couple more logs on the fire and lay on the couch under a blanket, staring at the ceiling, until I finally drifted into the kind of shallow, restless sleep, where you keep jerking awake because you think you heard something. In the morning, I pretended I'd just gotten up early. By day three, we started pretending the footprints and the figure were a game. We should name him, Ryan said at breakfast. Treeline Terry, Forest Frank,

Watching Walter. Stop, I said, seriously. He grinned in that way he always did when he knew he was getting to me. Come on, dude. If we were kids, we'd be making up some elaborate ritual by now. If you leave a beer on the porch, the watcher leaves you alone, that kind of thing. We're not kids, I said. And he's not a ritual.

He's just some guy. Some guy who likes long romantic walks around the cabin at night, Ryan said. We argued, half joking, half serious. about whether the prince from that morning were new or old, because there were prints again. The ring around the cabin was deeper now, tramped a little more, like the same path had been walked multiple times. They still didn't lead to or from the driveway. They still only circled. But there were a few extra tracks near the porch now, where someone had stepped closer, then gone back. Maybe he's the owner, Ryan kept saying. Maybe he's making sure we're not trashing the place.

Then why doesn't he knock? I asked. Why doesn't he say anything? Who walks around someone's cabin in the middle of the night and doesn't at least yell hey, when they know you're there? Some weird mountain dude, Ryan said. Guy who doesn't like talking to people. Maybe he lives off-grid somewhere back in those trees. You're overthinking it.

Maybe I was. Maybe the simple explanation really was that we were city idiots not used to rural people being weird. Still, when we went out snowshoeing that I was. afternoon. I found myself scanning the tree line constantly. We'd crest a little rise and I'd look around, and there he'd be, just at the edge of visibility, between two trees, or up on the lip of a distant hill, always the same distance away, always just far enough that you couldn't make out details. Once we were halfway around the lake when Ryan pointed out across the ice. Dude, there, I followed his finger. On the opposite shore, at the dark fringe of the woods,

The figure stood against the blur of trees. That same stillness. That same faint tilt of the head toward us. How is he over there? I asked. He was behind us ten minutes ago. Shortcut, Ryan said. Snowmobile. Teleportation.

I don't know, man. He raised his arm and flipped the guy off laughing. I half expected something to happen then. For the figure to flinch or wave or move. He didn't. He just watched us. By the time we got back to the cabin, the sky had darkened in that way that doesn't give you a proper sunset, just a slow dimming. Little bits of snow started to drift down.

The weather radio the host had left on a shelf crackled to life in the evening and announced that a system was moving in, with significant accumulation, expected over the next three to four days. Good thing we hit the gas station, Ryan said. We're stocked. Worse case, we just hunkered. down, play cards, and talk about our feelings. The thought of being stuck up there while it dumped snow wasn't appealing, but I tried to shrug it off. We had food, firewood, propane, a full tank of gas if we really needed to bail. We'd be fine. I didn't sleep well again that night. The snow

started in earnest sometime after midnight. I could hear it changing the sound of the world outside. This soft hiss over everything. No footsteps this time, or if there were, the snow swallowed them. Around three in the morning, I gave up on sleeping and got up to use the bathroom. On my way back to the bunk, something made me pause by the front door. The cabin had one of those vertical windows in the door, narrow and tall. It was mostly fogged and laced with frost on the inside, but you could see vague shapes, the porch railing, the top of the snowbank. The airing. The top of the snowbank, the darker smear of the trees beyond, and something else. A silhouette stood just beyond the porch steps, not close enough to be right at the door, but closer than he'd ever been before,

maybe 20 feet away. He was just a darker blur against the gray, no face, no features, but the outline was unmistakable, hat, shoulders, arms down. He was turned directly toward the door, toward me. My breath caught. For a second I thought about ducking, like if I moved out of his line of sight, he'd vanish. Instead, I stood perfectly still and stared. The longer I looked, the less sure I was of what I was seeing. The snow was coming down harder now, and each gust shifted the shapes outside, but that one dark vertical line remained, steady, unwavering. My skin crawled. My body wanted to do something. Back up, shout, wake Ryan. But my legs felt heavy. Then the wood stove popped, loud in the silence. I jumped, my heart leaping into my throat, and in that tiny

instant where my eyes flick toward the sound, I broke eye contact with the shape. When I looked back through the glass, all I saw was snow. The storm pinned us inside for the next three days. It wasn't a blizzard with howling wind and zero visibility the whole time. It was worse in a way, just relentless, steady snowfall. The trees collected layers until their lower branches hung low a few feet above the ground. The path to the outhouse, the indoor toilet was, for liquids only, the host had said in the listing, disappeared unless we shoveled it every few hours. The ring of footprints around the cabin vanished under eight inches of new snow.

We played cards, read the old paperbacks on the shelf, and took turns going outside to to knock snow off the satellite dish that didn't actually do anything for us, because there was no service anyway. Ryan kept making jokes about, our forest friend, snowed in somewhere, but even he stopped laughing as much after the second night of hearing things, because the noises continued. Sometimes it was the crunch of snow, muted but distinct, pacing somewhere beyond the walls. Sometimes it was this soft, weird scratching sound high up near the eaves, like branches moving against the log, except the nearest trees were too far away to be touching the cabin. Once in the middle of the second night I woke up because I thought I heard

someone whistling outside. Just a few notes, not any song I recognized, repeated in an odd pattern. When I held my breath and listened hard, it would stop. Then as soon as I started to relax, it would start again, just faint enough that I wasn't sure if it was real or my brain filling in the silence. Ryan started waking up tired and irritable, complaining of weird dreams I can't remember. He snapped at me over little things, how loud I was stirring my coffee, how often I checked the windows. On the fourth day of snow, the weather radio crackled and the mechanical voice announced road closures in higher elevations and avalanche danger in some backcountry areas. This is stupid, Ryan said. We should bail before it gets we're fine. We're fine.

I said. But the truth was, I wanted out too. Cabin fever had turned into something else, something that felt like being watched constantly. Inside, outside didn't matter. Let's at least see if we can get to the main road, Ryan said. If it's plowed, we head back to town, grab a motel, and chalk this up as an adventure. If it's not, then we know. That sounded reasonable. We loaded some emergency stuff into the car, blankets, extra clothes, the little first aid kit from under the sink, and brushed the snow off the Subaru. The driveway hadn't been plowed since before the storm, but the car made it with a lot of spinning and cursing.

The narrow forest road beyond was technically passable, but it was obvious no plow had been through since the snow started. It was deeper than anything I'd driven in before, and the edges of the road were invisible under the drifts. We're going to get stuck, I said. We've got all-wheel drive, Ryan said. We go slow. If it gets bad, we turn around.

We didn't get very far. Maybe half a mile from the cabin. We came around a bend and found a tree lying across the road. Not a huge one, but big enough that there was no way we'd be driving over or around it without ending up in the ditch. Crap, Ryan muttered, putting the car in park. Seriously? We got out to look. The trunk of the tree was splintered, the break fresh and raw.

It hadn't fallen naturally. It looked like something or someone had cut partway through it and then given it a hard shove. The snow around it was disturbed, not in a chaotic way but in big, careful footprints. A set pacing back and forth where someone had stood and pushed. A long line where they'd walked away, disappearing into the trees. The line ran parallel to the road for a while before curving deeper in the trees. to the woods. Standing there, I realized the distance from the roadside to the point where the tracks disappeared into the trees was about the same as the distance that man always seemed to keep from us.

Could be loggers, Ryan said, but his voice had lost some of its confidence. Why would loggers drop a tree across the only road? I asked. To keep idiots like us out of their hair, he said, but we both knew it was a stretch. We trudged back to the car in silence. There was some arguing about whether we should try to move the tree ourselves, but without a chainsaw or even a proper axe, it would have taken hours, and the snow was still coming down. In the end, we went back to the cabin. That afternoon, while Ryan napped, I went through the drawer of random cabin stuff again, just to give myself something to do. Tucked underneath the playing cards and a couple of old local guidebooks, I found another notebook. This one was smaller than the guest book and didn't have

the host's cutesy welcome on the first page. It was just a plain black spiral with a few pages torn out of the front. I flipped it open, expecting grocery lists or maybe someone's unfinished crossword puzzles. Instead, I found dates. January 3rd, arrived. Road not bad, cabin smaller than pictures but cozy. Saw a guy on the drive-in standing by the trees, thought he might be the owner, but he never came up. January 5th, footprints around the cabin. One set, all. the way around. No tracks too were from the drive, heard walking last night. Elle thought it was an animal, but it sounded like boots. January 7th. Seen him three times now, always standing at the tree line, always the same distance away,

no matter where we are. I thought it was different people at first, but he always stands the same way. Arms down, head turned slightly like he's listening. The handwriting was messy but readable. There were more entries. Not every day, but enough to sketch out a pattern. January 9th. Elle wants to go talk to him. I told him not to. I don't know why. Something about the way he moves or doesn't move. It's like the space around him isn't right. January 10th. Storm. Roads probably bad. We heard whistling last night. Elle slept through it, of course. Today we found a line of tracks in the snow near the porch. They came closer than before. January 11th. We tried to leave. Tree of across the road. I swear I saw him standing up the hill above it, watching. Elle didn't see him.

I don't think we were supposed to go yet. That entry trailed off mid-sentence. The last line just a pen-skid like whoever was writing had jerked their hand or been interrupted. The pages after that were blank. By the time I finished reading, my hands were shaking. The dates didn't have a year, but the calendar pinned on the wall in the kitchen was turned to January, even though it was actually March. The days and weekdays matched up with the numbers in the notebook, like whoever had been here last hadn't bothered to flip it. Rye, I called. He grunted from the bedroom. What? You need to see this. He came out rubbing his eyes, took the notebook from me, and skimmed the entries. I watched his face move from annoyance to concentration to something tighter. Okay, that's weird, he said finally.

So what? Someone before us saw the same guy, creepy backwoods, dude, small world. They tried to leave and the road was blocked, I said. Same as us. He flipped back, rereading. Or they just wrote it that way, dude. You know how people get about spooky cabin in the woods stuff. Someone probably thought it'd be funny to leave a scary story behind. This isn't a story, I said. It lines up too well. With what? He snapped. With the guy we keep sort of seeing through the damn trees when we're half frozen and half drunk? You realize how suggestible we are out here? It's quiet. It's weird. And now we're reading about footprints and whistles right after experiencing footprints and whistles. Our brains are filling in blanks.

I wanted to believe him. I really did. But it felt like too many coincidences stacked in a row. Do you remember signing the guest book when we got here? I asked. He frowned. We never did. Exactly, I said. Maybe that's what happened with them too. They started and then, something. I didn't finish the sentence. He closed the notebook and dropped it back into the drawer harder than he needed to. We've got a few more days here. The storm will pass. We'll dig ourselves out, and we'll laugh about Forrest Frank for the rest of our lives. That's it. There is no haunted guy. There is no pattern. There are weird people and weird weather. And that's all. But that night, he double-checked the lock on the door twice before bed.

And when the whistling started again, faint under the hiss of snow, I heard him sit up and swear under his breath. I don't know exactly when things tipped from This is Creepy into something worse. It's not like there was one big scene where the lights went out and something scratched at the door. It was more like a bunch of smaller moments piling up until, Looking back, I can see that we were way past the point of normal, like the morning we found our own stuff arranged on the porch. It was the seventh day of the trip, the day the storm finally eased.

The sky was still overcast, but there were occasional lighter patches where you could almost convince yourself the sun was behind them. We opened the door to go shovel a path to the car, and there, lined up neatly on the doormat, were four items. my red lighter, the small folding knife Ryan always kept in his jeans pocket, my hat, the one I'd left on the arm of the couch, and Ryan's keychain. All of those things had been inside the cabin the night before. The lighter I'd used to help start the fire, the knife Ryan had used to open a can.

My hat I remembered taking off and tossing onto the couch when it got hot. In his keychain, that one was worse because I remembered him making a point of clippiness. it onto the loop by the door so we don't lose it in all this crap. Now they were outside, laid in a perfectly straight line, each item evenly spaced, no footprints leading away from them, just the scuffed prints on the porch where we stood, newly added. I picked up my lighter. It was cold to the touch, like it had been out there a while. Ryan swore, a short, vicious word that didn't make him feel any better. We locked the door, right? I said, my throat dry.

Of course we locked the door, he snapped, and the windows. I checked. Someone's been inside, I said. Saying it out loud made the cabin feel smaller, like the walls were leaning in. Or you left your stuff outside, he said, but his voice cracked. I didn't, I said. Rye, I remember. Well, what do you want me to say?

He exploded, rounding on me, that some creeper broke in, tiptoed around while we were sleeping, stole a few random things, and then laid them out all cute on the porch. That he's doing like performance art for us. I didn't answer. There was no good answer. We argued for a while. Stupid stuff about who checked what and when. Voices bouncing too loud off the logs.

Underneath it, though, we were both afraid. We spent that afternoon doing practical things, bringing in more firewood, checking the propane, shoveling the car completely clear, pointing the Subaru toward the driveway, so we'd be ready to go the second the road was passable. We didn't talk much. The man in the trees didn't show himself that day.

Or maybe he did, and we just didn't notice because we were so focused on pretend normal tasks. That thought bothers me more now than if I'd seen him. On the ninth day, we decided to make another attempt at leaving. The snow had stopped entirely. It was bright in that way where the whole sky is white and the ground is white in your eyes water from the glare. The air was so still that sound seemed to carry forever. We'd seen a plow go by on the main road the night before, the faint orange flash slipping between the trees in the distance.

That meant there was a decent chance it was clear again. We layered up, grabbed the notebook, I wasn't leaving that behind now, and climbed into the car. The driveway was a little easier this time, packed and re-frozen. When we got to the fallen tree, though, it was still there, but it had moved. It no longer lay straight across the road. Instead, it had been dragged a few feet down toward the ditch,

leaving just enough of a gap on the left side that theoretically, a car might squeeze around it with the right angle and a little luck. The snow around it was torn up with footprints, deep divvets, long drag marks. It looked like someone or something very strong had wrestled it around. Ryan put the car in park and killed the engine. Well, he said, I stared at the gap. It was narrow, and the edge of the road there sloped down. If we misjudged, we'd slide into the ditch and be well and truly screwed.

It looks like someone wanted us to think we could make it through, I said quietly. That's a messed up way to look at it, Ryan said. I'm choosing to believe this is the universe giving us a shot. He started the car again. The engine sounded too loud in the silence. I realized I was digging my nails into my eyes. my palms and forced myself to unclench my hands. As we inched forward, something moved on the hill above us. I looked up. He was there, standing on the rise about 30 yards beyond the tree,

exactly the same as ever, same distance, same angle of his head. He was watching us. Rye, I said, don't. He didn't look up. His focus was on the gap. We can do this, he said. Just guide me. If it looks bad, we stop, okay? Rye, I said. said again. He's right there. He flicked his eyes up, saw the man, and I watched his jaw tighten. Good, he said. Maybe he can enjoy the show. Eyes on the road, man. Come on. I did as he asked, because at that point I didn't know what else to do. We crept forward, the tires biting into the packed snow. The left wheels slipped toward the edge and the car tilted in a way that made my stomach drop. Back up, I said. Back up. He gripped the wheel harder. I've got it just a little bit more

The back end of the Subaru slid suddenly, the sound of ice under the tires turning to a sick grind as the left rear wheel dropped off the edge of the road and into the ditch. The whole car lurched. No, he hissed, slamming it into reverse. The wheel just spun. We both got out, breath exploding in white snorts. The left rear tire was buried in the powder up to the rim. Even if we dug it out, we'd probably just spin more.

There was nothing solid under there, just more snow. and a shallow, icy slope. Fantastic, Ryan said, kicking at the snow. Fantastic, great. Love this for us. I looked up at the hill. The man was still there, same spot, same distance. But now I could see something else. He was turned slightly, not just toward us, but toward the cabin's direction.

Like he was trying to watch both at once. Something about that detail made my skin crawl more than if he'd been staring straight out. us. We'll dig it out, Ryan said. We'll stick some branches under the tire. I saw a video about this once. As we pulled the little collapsible shovel out of the hatch and started digging, the silence pressed in. The man watched. At one point, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him raise a hand, just slightly, like he was about to wave or gesture. But when I looked directly, his arm was down again. We spent 40 minutes fighting that car. Every time we made a little progress, the tire would hit some new patch of ice and slip. Eventually, exhausted, we admitted defeat.

We can walk it, Ryan said on the trudge back to the cabin. Worse case, we hike all the way to the highway, flag somebody down. It's what, ten miles? People do that. We're not going to die out here. I glanced back at the hill one more time. The man hadn't moved. That night was the worst. not because anything huge and dramatic happened all at once, but because it felt like the whole world outside the cabin had decided to lean closer. The whistling came back, but louder now, circling the cabin the way the footprints had. Wee, we, we, ooh, we, ooh. Sometimes right by one wall, sometimes fading, then picking up near another.

At first I thought it was the wind doing something weird through the trees, but the pattern was too deliberate. it. The notes were the same, over and over, like someone who had never heard actual music trying to imitate it. Ryan lay in the bunk above me, unmoving. At one point I whispered his name, and he didn't answer. I thought he was asleep until I heard him mutter. I hear it. Shut up. The scratching at the eaves returned, longer now, like something was dragging. I don't know. branches or fingers across the logs. It moved too smoothly to be random.

At some point near dawn, I must have dozed off because I woke up standing at the front door with my hand on the handle. My heart thudded against my ribs. I had no memory of getting up. Through the narrow window in the door, the sky was that flat pre-dawn gray. The porch was empty. The snow beyond it was undisturbed.

But out at the tree line, out at that same distance as always, there was a shape. He was farther left than usual, almost aligned with the path that led toward the lake. He stood perfectly still, facing the cabin. I stared out at him. My fingers tightened on the doorknob. There was this urging in me to open it, step out, walk toward him. Not like a thought, but like someone pushing gently on the back of my mind.

I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them again, he was gone. I let go of the doorknob and stumbled back like it had burned me. I didn't go back to bed after that. I sat at the table, holding a mug of coffee I couldn't bring myself to drink, and watched the lights seep into the woods. Every so often I'd think I saw a flicker of movement among the trees, but it was probably just my eyes playing tricks.

At some point Ryan came out, eyes bloodshot. We're leaving, he said, voice hoarse. We tried, I said. We're leaving, he repeated. We'll pack what we can carry, put on every piece of clothing we have, and walk the road until we hit a town or a house or a ranger or something. I'm not staying here another night. He looked worse than I felt, and that was saying something. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his usual cocky energy was just gone.

I realized with a jolt that at some point, the last two days, he'd stopped making jokes entirely. Okay, I said. Yeah, okay. We packed in silence. Food, water, extra socks, the emergency blanket. We left the heavier stuff behind. I stuffed the little notebook into my jacket again without thinking about it. I didn't look out the window.

We locked the door out of habit more than anything and started down the driveway toward the road. It was properly light out now, but the clouds were thick. Snow lay in soft hills on either side of our path. Our breath came out in white, bursts. For the first ten minutes I kept expecting to see him, off to one side, halfway up a hill, just beyond the first row of trees, but the woods stayed empty. Maybe he's sleeping in, Ryan muttered once, voice tight. We didn't talk much after that. Our boots crunched. Somewhere far

off, a bird called. The sound made me weirdly hopeful. Birds meant normal life. When we reached the car, we stopped and looked at it, half in the road, half in the ditch, like some dead animal. Sorry, buddy, Ryan said, patting the hood. We'll come back for you with a toe. We kept walking. The road twisted between the trees, climbing gently. After a while, I realized I'd lost my sense of distance. It felt like we'd been walking forever, but logically it had only been maybe half an hour. Should have hit that gas station by now, Ryan said, breathing harder. I started to say we weren't even close, but then I realized I wasn't sure. The landmarks all blurred in the snow.

Every bend looked like the last. We came around a tight curve and my stomach dropped. The tree that had blocked the road was ahead of us. We'd walked in a straight line, following the tire tracks in our own previous footprints, and somehow we were back at the same fallen tree. That's not possible, I said. My voice sounded too loud. Ryan laughed in this high blue.

riddle way. We must have turned around without noticing. We didn't, I said. We just followed the road. We never reversed. Well, apparently we did. He snapped. Unless you've got some other explanation. I didn't. My brain kept trying to conjure slightly different details to prove that this was a second similar tree. But there was the same splintered trunk, the same drag marks, the same scuffed snow, the same footprints leading off into the woods at an angle. I looked up the hill. He was there, standing on the rise above us, in the exact same spot where he'd been when we'd tried to drive around the tree.

Same distance, same angle of the head. Only this time, I swear to you, he was closer by a few feet. That small difference made my stomach twist. I had the sense of something slowly closing in, millimeter by millimeter. Rye, I whispered. I see him, he said. His voice was flat now. Keep walking. What? I asked. Just keep walking, he said. Don't stop. Don't look at him too long. So we did. We kept walking, past the tree, back the way we'd come. When we reached the car again, my brain screamed that this made no sense. We were caught in some

kind of loop, being pulled between two points whether we wanted to or not. We should cut through the woods, I said weakly. Just go straight, follow the side. slope down, hit the main road from another angle. Yeah, Ryan said. Okay, yeah. We left the road then, stepping off into the deeper snow, angling down the hill. The snow was mid-thigh in some places, and every step was an effort. We pushed through a stand of younger trees, branches whipping our jackets. Visibility shrank. The road vanished behind us. And then, after maybe ten minutes of slogging, the trees thinned and we stumbled back onto the plowed road, just 50 feet from the cabin's driveway. We both stopped dead.

Maybe we zigzagged, Ryan said after a moment. His breath puffed out fast. Maybe we overcorrected. The cabin sat in its little clearing, still and small. Smoke from the chimney drifted straight up into the gray. At the far edge of the clearing, aligned almost perfectly with the corner of the cabin, was a dark shape. He was standing there. same distance as always, watching us.

I realized with a cold clarity that washed over any arguments that we weren't leaving, not by car, not on foot, not while whatever this was wanted us there. It wasn't as simple as lost in the woods or took a wrong turn. The space itself was wrong. It was folding around us, hurting us back to the cabin like cattle. We need to go inside, Ryan said. We regroup, we, I don't know, we wait. We ride out the two weeks and then maybe it lets us go.

I'm out of ideas, man. How do you know it'll let us go then? I asked. Voice shaking. He didn't answer. The last three days blurred together into this slow-motion panic. We tried a dozen more times to leave in smaller ways, walking the driveway backward, marking trees with bright orange bits of cloth, taking a compass and following it religiously.

Every time, somehow, we ended up back at the cabin, or at the fallen tree, or standing in the clearing watching the cabin from the exact distance where the man always stood. That last one only happened once, and both of us agreed after that to pretend it hadn't. We didn't talk about how, standing there, looking at the cabin from that vantage, I'd felt something like familiarity, like I'd stood in that spot a thousand times before, watching people move behind the windows. The man in the trees was almost a constant presence now, not every time we looked, but often enough that it felt like he was just waiting between moments of attention. We'd glance up from some pointless task, and there he'd be, off by the lake,

or on a little ridge, or half hidden behind a particular cluster of pines, always the same distance away, always still. Once I saw him in two places at once. I was in the bedroom looking at out the side window, and I caught a glimpse of him by the frozen creek that cut through the property. Then Ryan called my name from the front room, and when I went out there, he pointed to the front window. There, he said. The man was standing at the edge of the clearing out front. If I turned my head just right, I could still see the edge of him by the creek through the bedroom doorway. Two figures, same posture, same distance, in different directions. I blinked, hard, And when my eyes refocused, the one by the creek was gone, the one out front remained.

Never mind, Ryan said. His voice sounded thin. I don't want to know. The second to last night, I cracked. We'd gone to bed early because there was nothing else to do and our bodies were exhausted from the constant tension. I lay there staring at the underside of the bunk above me, listening to the crackle of the fire and the faint groaning of the cabin settling. Outside, the whistling started up again. Wee, we, ooh, we, we, ooh, Ryan muttered something and rolled over.

I lay there, jaw clenched, counting each repetition. It was spaced out every 15 seconds or so, circling the cabin slowly. It didn't sound like anyone's idea of a normal whistle. The notes were just off enough to make my teeth itch. Something in me snapped. I threw off my blanket, grabbed the flashlight from the shelf, and stomped out into the main room. Before I could give my fear time to turn me around, I yanked the door open and stepped onto the porch. The cold hit me like a slap. My breath exploded in front of me. I flipped on the flashlight

and swept the beam across the clearing. Enough, I shouted my voice cracking. Just come here, just tell us what you want. The whistling stopped. The silence that followed was worse. My flashlight beam picked out the sparkle of snow, the edge of the tree line, the shadowed forms of trunks. Everything looked exactly the same as a hundred other times. Then at the very edge of the beam it caught on something vertical. He was there. Not at the far tree line, but halfway between the cabin and the woods. Closer than he'd ever been, maybe 40 feet away. He'd stepped

past whatever invisible barrier had been holding him. My hand shook. I dragged the beam up from his boots to his chest to his face. At first, I thought the beam just wasn't reaching well enough. because his face seemed wrong, too smooth, too blank. Then I realized what I was actually seeing. He had no face. There was a head, yes, and a hat pulled low. But beneath the brim where eyes and a nose and a mouth should have been, there was just...

Nothing. A flat expanse of pale, smooth skin, like someone had erased all the features. I don't mean he was turned away or shadowed. I mean I was looking dead on at something that had the right shape, but none of the details, and my brain kept trying to fill in eyes and failing. My stomach lurched. I took an involuntary step back. The figure took one slow step forward. Ryan, I whispered, throat tight. Rye, get out here. I couldn't tear my gaze away. My body screamed

at me to run, but my legs wouldn't move. Another step. Closer now. The flashlight beam shook so badly that the world smeared. Ryan, I shouted, voice climbing. Now! The bedroom door banged open behind me. I heard Ryan's footsteps, then his breath at my shoulder. What are you? Oh no, he said. He saw it too. I know he did because his hand grabbed my arm hard enough to bruise.

The faceless man stopped about 25 feet from the porch. Still beyond the little depression in the yard, but close enough now that we could see the texture of his coat. It was old. canvas maybe, stained darker in places. His boots were sunk a couple inches into the snow. Behind him, the tree line seemed farther away than usual, like the clearing had stretched. I don't know how long we stood there facing each other. Me and Ryan on the porch. The thing in the snow. The beam of my flashlight turned his featureless head into a pale, perfect oval.

Then slowly, his hand lifted. He raised his arm from his side until it was out. palm facing us, not in a wave, more like a barrier, a stop. Are you, the guy from the forest, Ryan asked, voice shaking. It was the dumbest question I've ever heard, but what else do you say? The faceless head tilted slightly, like he was listening. Do you want something from us? I forced out. The head turned to me, the flat surface where a face should have been oriented fully in my direction. I felt something pushed just behind my eyes, like the beginning of a headache. My vision blurred at the edges for a second. Nope, Ryan said suddenly under his breath. In one swift motion, he slammed the door and shoved the deadbolt. The instant the door shut, the pressure

in my head eased. It was like someone had taken their thumb off my brain. What the hell are you doing? I shouted, turning on him. He was breathing hard, eyes wide. We don't look at it, he said. We don't go near it. That's the only rule that makes sense. How does that make sense? I demanded. I don't know, he yelled back. But every time we try to interact with it, leave, get closer, whatever, things get worse. It got close when you walked out there. You looked right at it. It wants that. It wants us to really see it. And I don't think we come back from that if we do. We stared at each other, both shaking. Outside's, Something moved quickly across the porch, not footsteps, not exactly.

More like the sense of a shadow passing by. The window next to the door went a shade darker for a second. Wee, we, we, ooh, we, we, ooh. The whistling started again, louder now, not circling, right outside. We didn't sleep at all that night. The last day everything broke. By then, we were both frayed down to threads. We hadn't really eaten.

We were jumpy and snappish. The air in the cabin felt used. up. The man, whatever he was, stayed visible more often, always at that intermediate distance he'd stopped at the night before. Not at the tree line, not at the porch, but maybe 25 or 30 feet out. Sometimes he'd be on one side of the cabin, sometimes another, always at that same radius. By late afternoon, a weird kind of numbness had crept in. There's only so long you can stay wound up before something in you gives out. I can't do this, Ryan said suddenly.

He stood, grabbed his jacket, and headed for the door. Where are you going? I asked, panic flaring. Out, he said. I'm going to talk to him. We tried that, I said. You said yourself. I don't care what I said, he snapped. I need this to end. If he's going to kill us, then fine. If he's going to tell us what to do, also fine. I am not sitting here another night listening to that stupid whistle and waiting to maybe die in my sleep.

He yanked the door open before I could stop him. The faceless man was already there, at the exact distance from the porch that he'd stopped at before, like he'd been frozen in anticipation of this moment. Hey, Ryan shouted, stomping down the steps into the snow. Hey, you, what do you want? Rye, I yelled, get back here. He ignored me, slogging through the snow. the faceless head tilted toward him.

Every instinct in my body screamed that this was wrong, that he shouldn't cross whatever invisible line lay between the porch and that spot, that we'd been allowed to watch from inside, like animals in a cage, but stepping into the circle was something else. I stepped onto the porch, heart pounding, but I couldn't bring myself to go down the steps. There was this weight in the air, this field of pressure that made moving feel like wading through syrup.

Ryan stopped about six feet from the faceless man. Up close, I could see that the smooth expanse where a face should have been wasn't perfectly flat. There were subtle impressions, hollows where eyes might have been, the faintest suggestion of a nose. Like something had been erased, but the ghost of it remained. What do you want? Ryan repeated, voice cracking.

The faceless man raised his hand again, palm out, and for a second I thought he was going to touch Ryan's chest. Instead, he moved his hand in a small, careful motion, pointing, not at Ryan, not at the cabin, but at the woods behind us, the direction of the fallen tree, the road. Then he dropped his hand. I don't understand, Ryan said. The faceless head tilted, and then, without warning, it jerked sharply, not toward Ryan, but toward me.

The pressure in the air slammed into my skull. My vision went white at the edges. I heard a sound like someone blowing out a candle, only huge and deep, right inside my head. The last thing I saw clearly was Ryan's face turning toward me, eyes wide not with fear, but with realization. Then everything went black. I don't know how long I was out. When I came to, I was lying on the floor of the cabin, back against the wall near the door.

The fire had burned low. The room was dim. My head throbbed like I'd been hit. When I touched my nose, my fingers came away with a smear of blood. For a minute, I didn't remember where I was or what had happened. Then the last hour slammed back into my brain and I surged to my feet, stumbling to the door. I yanked it open. The clearing outside was empty.

There were footprints in the snow. Churned up where Ryan had walked, where the faceless man had stood. There was a deep impression where it looked like someone had dropped to their knees. But there were no fresh tracks leading away. No blood, no drag marks. Ryan was gone. I screamed his name until my throat hurt. I ran around the cabin, boots slipping.

I checked the path to the lake, the line of trees, the spot by the creek, nothing. The only tracks were the ones I knew, ours from earlier, the weird ring that had been walked and re-walked around the cabin, now half filled with new snow. No Ryan, no faceless man, just emptiness. At some point my voice gave out. inside in a daze, shut the door, and slid down it until I was sitting on the floor. For a long time I just listened. No whistling, no footsteps, nothing at all.

You'd think that would have been a relief, but it wasn't. The silence felt worse, like a held breath waiting to see what I'd do next. After a while, I remembered the notebook in my jacket. My hands shook as I pulled it out and flipped to the last page with writing. I don't think we were supposed to go yet. I grabbed the pen that hung from the guest book, and without really deciding to, started to write under that line. He took Ryan.

I don't know how. We were right there. We were right there. One second he was in the snow and then he wasn't. I think I blacked out. I think that thing used him to get to me or used me to get to him. I can't tell anymore. My handwriting was worse than the person before me, shaky and barely legible.

If you're reading this and you're here, leave. Don't try to talk to him. Don't look at his face. I stared at the last sentence, then underlined it until the pen tore the paper. The air in the cabin felt stale. I couldn't stay inside. I stepped out onto the porch again, half expecting him to be there, faceless and waiting. The yard was still empty.

The trees stood in their usual silent ranks. But something had changed. The sense of wrongness, the warped space, the pressure, felt different now. not gone exactly but shifted like whatever had been holding us here had released its grip on one of us the road when i walked down to it looked normal the fallen tree was still there but now there was a cut through it a clean chainsaw smooth slice that hadn't been there before on the hill above where he'd always stood there was no one i walked past the tree heart hammering half expecting to snap back to the cabin like before I didn't. The road continued bending away between the pines. Each step took me farther from the cabin, and this time, nothing folded around me to push me back. The invisible boundary, whatever it was, had moved. I think you know where. I made it to the main highway that day. Hours of walking, legs burning, every crunch of snow startling me. A plow driver eventually picked me up,

staring at my cracked lips and bloodshot eyes in the way I kept glancing at the tree line. He asked where my friend was. I opened my mouth and realized I didn't have a good answer. He stayed at the cabin, I said finally. We got separated. They found the cabin. They found the Subaru. They found the ring of footprints and the churned up snow in the yard.

But no sign of a struggle, no blood. nothing you could point to as evidence that someone had been taken or hurt. They searched the woods. You can probably guess how that went. He probably walked out on you, one of the deputies said, not unkindly. People do weird things up here. If he wants to be found, he'll turn up. They didn't see the notebook.

Or if they did, they assumed it was just cabin graffiti and left it. I went home eventually, physically. The problem is, I don't think I really left. Because here's the part I haven't told anyone except now, like this. I still see him, not every day, not even every week. But sometimes I'll be walking across a parking lot, or cutting through the little clump of trees by the river in my town, or sitting in traffic near some scrubby roadside brush,

and I'll look up and see a figure at the edge of things. Always at the same distance, arms at his sides, head tilted just a little, like he's listening. Sometimes I blink, and he's gone. Sometimes he stays for a few seconds, long enough for me to realize that no one else is looking in that direction. I don't go near him. I don't try to see his face.

I don't need to. Because deep down, under all the denial and the half explanations I tell myself to get through the day, I know. I know that whatever deals or patterns govern that cabin in the Idaho woods didn't just let me walk away for free. Something was traded. Something was passed on. Ryan disappeared into that clearing without a trace, a place that had been incapable of letting us leave

suddenly opened, just wide enough for one of us. The boundary moved. It's not around that cabin anymore, not entirely. It's around me. I am the new distance. I am the new radius. I don't stand outside people's houses in the snow. I don't circle cabins in the night. That's not how it works. My body is here, in my little apartment, my little city light. But something in me is always standing just at the edge of someone else's world watching. I feel it when my vision swims for a second for no reason. When I catch myself staring out a window for too long, not really seeing what's in front of me, but something just beyond it.

And sometimes, when I come back from those moments, there's snow in my eyelashes. I don't know who I'm watching. I don't know what happens to them when they step past whatever circle they're not supposed to cross. I just know that somewhere, some other poor idiot is in a cabin in the woods, looking out at a man standing off in the distance. And when they squint, trying to make out my face, there's a part of me that wants to raise my hand and tell them, don't, don't look at me, don't come closer, because if you see me clearly, if you really see what's standing at the edge of your life, I think that's when whatever's behind me steps into focus, and I still remember how it felt. That one split second before everything went black to know that something was standing right behind my shoulder,

close enough to breathe on my neck, and that the faceless thing in front of me was just the shadow it cast. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply.