1.

We’ve been on the trail for two weeks. We were already tired and ready to make our way back to town when a new urgency arose after Lindsay broke her ankle scaling a slope around noon earlier today. She insists that it’s only twisted or sprained, but the grotesque angle of the joint and the swelling purple mass developing around it makes us all hesitant to let her walk back with us. Instead, two of us – myself and Jeremy – will make our way back up the trail at an expedited speed to grab a car and come pick everyone else up. The group will stay put at camp and keep an eye on Lindsay’s ankle.

I didn’t volunteer myself for this task out of any sense of generosity, but out of the restlessness which always inhabits me and increases with every second of stillness. The idea of waiting around at camp for days with nothing to do is nightmarish, to say the least. Jeremy volunteered both because his car is closest – he joined the trip a few days later and started at a trailhead further south than the one the rest of us came from – and because he is the most experienced hiker of the group, who is smart enough to know that no one should traverse even the most familiar of trails alone.

We’ve already packed so that we can take off at the first hint of morning. For now, the sun is setting, casting a reddish-purple haze, something like the color of Lindsay’s injured ankle, over the landscape. I still haven’t acclimated to the stoic beauty of this land. Even as I crave a soft bed, a cold beer, and the convenience of a car, it’s hard to accept that I’ll be saying goodbye to this wilderness so soon. Rocky slopes rise and fall like frozen waves reaching toward the horizon. Some of the most towering peaks remain topped with little caps of white snow even in these hot midsummer days. Every further slip of the sun away from us brings further chill, as if the baking heat of the day were a prolonged illusion to be easily blown away. Tall, pointed conifers - deep green and jutting like spires from the earth - obscure much of the land at this lower elevation. Their shadows appear longer than usual tonight. They pull the landscape sideways, compressing the land in uncomfortable ways that my mind can’t quite comprehend. Those pools of darkness operate within a different time, an ancient time.

I can’t help but feel unsettled at the prospect of sleeping alongside those shadows without even the thin veil of a tent, which I will have to do as we won’t be bringing our tents with us for the sake of lightness and efficiency. For now, though, I can settle into my canvas nest and sleep soundly until dawn. My watch shows that it’s nine in the evening. If I fall asleep soon, I should have more than enough energy for the first day of our journey.

2.

Our first day of travel passed uneventfully. The sun shined bright and hot but we managed to stay cool by keeping ourselves near the shelter of the trees, which formed a climate entirely of their own under their thickets of needles. Despite the optimal conditions, Jeremy and I are both fatigued and aching from the effort required to cover so much ground in just one day - nearly 20 miles, if the various trail markers along the way are to be believed. I’m not so sure if my estimate is accurate, as at a certain point, all I could do was keep moving until my mind slipped away from me and I didn’t feel anything at all, or notice anything more than the rocks and roots I had to step around. My body is now heavy and stiff, like a living corpse. The trail didn’t feel nearly so demanding on the way in, but then again, we had meandered pleasurably on our way down the trail, sometimes traversing only 4 or 5 miles in a day. This process is of an entirely different kind.

There is really only one thing even marginally noteworthy concerning today’s exhausting hike. Somewhere along the way, the hands of my watch stopped moving. They’re currently frozen at three, and whether they stopped at 3am as I slept or 3pm as I walked, I can’t be sure. The tiny numbers no longer have meaning without the movement of the hands and that makes me feel unmoored. I had no idea how much my understanding of the world relied on the steady and predictable measurement of time, but now that I’ve lost it, I feel like a child learning the world from scratch. Jeremy forgot his watch at camp, so our only way of ascertaining time is by the sun. It’s just as well - all we need to know is when to stop for the day, and the lengthening of the shadows is more than enough to notify us. Still, the loss of time seems to be rewiring me from the core outward, significantly altering the nature of my days into something far more abstract and enveloping.

We’re settled in for the night now, though, and even though it’s only a thin sleeping bag rolled out onto the pebbles and pine needles, I’m relieved to have a place to rest. Beef jerky and cold canned beans don’t feel like nearly enough to fill the void in my stomach left by so much exertion, but it will have to do for now. As I get ready to sleep, I can think of nothing but the hamburger and fries that I will get once we reach town. Just the thought of it satisfies me enough to relax into sleep.

3.

I find myself more than a little shaken this morning. Memories of the night rush into my waking moments and I find myself unable to tell dream from reality. I’ve already tried to explain to Jeremy, but he has no clue what I’m talking about. Still, I can’t let go of the strangeness of it.

In the middle of the night - it could have been any time between 10 and 3, I only know it was so, so dark - I was aroused by a sudden silence. After two weeks of sleeping along this trial, I know it’s never completely silent. In the absence of traffic, TV, radios, beeping pagers and ringing phones, I’ve found the forests and mountains to be surprisingly loud and teeming with sound. At night, bats chirp and screech to find their way; nocturnal rodents rustle in the undergrowth; tiny insect wings beat against little exoskeletal bodies; and soft breezes whisper through the pines. And yet, there was a moment last night in which all sound ceased to be, to the extent that it disturbed my unconscious mind and woke me.

I first stayed still and stared into the vast night sky. The glittering heavens that had brought me so much peace in the previous nights of languid, satisfied stargazing now bothered me, for the light of the stars was simultaneously clear yet did not seem to touch me or the earth. This dual reality of a luminous sky and unnaturally dark surroundings confused my brain into a stupor, and, ridiculously, I was afraid to look into the surrounding woods and see how truly deep the darkness was. I felt I’d woken on a distant moon where all sound was swallowed and the rules of light operated completely differently.

If I’d been alone, I may have remained stuck like that until falling back to sleep. But along with the silence of the woods was the lack of sound from Jeremy’s sleeping bag, so I made myself turn my head to see if he was still there.

There was only his bag, rumpled and empty, as if it had been shrugged off suddenly and quickly.

The void where Jeremy should have been was a black hole that pulled deep, previously unrecognized fears out of me, brought them to the surface of my thoughts and sent my heart racing. I didn’t think of bears, mountain lions, murderers, or anything else so specific. My fear was a pure, unfocused reaction to the emptiness and silence, vague yet all-encompassing, as if my insides were quickly emptied out, no more bones or organs or blood, only an expanding universe of possibility. I forced myself to first sit up, then stand, and look around for signs of my friend.

Thinking now, I’m not sure why it never crossed my mind that maybe he’d stepped away to pee or smoke a cigarette, but such ideas didn’t occur to me at the time. I did, at least, think to grab my flashlight and pursue the tracks Jeremy left in his wake. Reason reclaimed my senses bit by bit and I was able to recognize that there were no signs of struggle and, in fact, Jeremy’s trail appeared so certain and purposeful, the geometry of it struck me as programmed, even robotic. I followed it away from the flat clearing we’d made camp at and down a gentle slope. After a few minutes, I stopped at the banks of a narrow creek, which took me by surprise as it also made no sound, even as the water trickled over the rocks. Jeremy’s trail vanished into the water, leaving me uncertain as to whether I was seeing things correctly. Yet something compelled me to raise my flashlight and direct it across the water at the bank on the other side.

Jeremy appeared under the flashlight’s beam, staring directly at me with wide but unseeing eyes. His face under the light was a pale crater sapped of color. His pants were drenched in creek water from hem to mid-calf, yet he didn’t seem the least uncomfortable. He stood straight and stiff, a posture unlike anything I’d seen on him before, all hints of his typically easy-going manner erased. Jeremy had conditioned his body into a strong and sturdy machine through years of hiking, rock climbing, rowing, and every other outdoor activity available to him; yet against the darkness, he appeared to me as weak and fragile as a child in a storybook staring into the yawning doorway of a haunted house. His blankness intertwined with the trench of fear inside of me, egging it on, reflecting it, validating it. After what felt like minutes of him not blinking and me breathing deeply as I grasped for some vestige of decisive reasoning, I decided he must be sleepwalking and leaped carefully over the water to reach him.

I couldn’t remember if you were supposed to wake up sleepwalkers or not, but it didn’t seem wise to let him wander unconscious in the mountains at night, so I shook his shoulders until he woke. I reached out to touch him in the same way one might reach toward water that they hope to be warm but worry may be cold. I found little reassurance from grasping into the fabric of his jacket, but the hints of lucidity returning to him calmed the raging space inside of me just a bit. He was disoriented and didn’t say a word, but followed me back to camp, settled into his sleeping bag, and quickly fell back asleep.

I’m not sure when in that process the sounds came back, but by the time I’d returned with Jeremy I could once more hear crickets chirping and the rustle of small animals in the bushes. The light of the stars and half moon now touched the pines and rocks as logic dictated they should. I tried to sleep but spent much of the rest of the night watching Jeremy, as solid as a rock and snoring softly, to ensure he didn’t sleepwalk again.

This morning, I asked Jeremy about it and he claims not to remember a thing. He says he’s never sleepwalked before and that I’d probably had some kind of weird waking dream. I told him that with the same logic, I could say I’d never had such a waking dream before so therefore he must have been sleepwalking, but he didn’t respond to my argument. Neither one of us wants to accept the responsibility of being the one who lost touch with reality, who can’t trust his own mind and senses, so it seems preferable to let the uncertainty hang in the air between us without a resolution.

Whatever happened, this morning is clear, cool, and pleasant. We plan to make even more progress than we did yesterday. We should only have to sleep one more night here before reaching Jeremy’s car. Thank God for that.

4.

In light of last night’s events, the trail took on a strange and uncanny quality even in the clarity of sunlight. Darkness appeared to lurk where it shouldn’t, and light played tricks on me, appearing like animals or even people hidden among the trees, only to make a fool of me and dissipate as soon as I turned my full face to look. I assume I must just be tired after so much walking and so little sleep. We made roughly 25 miles today, more than I’ve ever hiked in a day, and more than I ever want to hike in one day again. We’ve just finished eating “dinner,” which was more jerky, more beans, and the remains of some coveted chocolate granola bars which we’d been rationing carefully as we traveled. It’s dark and there’s nothing left to do but sleep, but I find myself afraid to do so. Jeremy’s already dozing and I’m watching him, unsure which frightens me more: the prospect of repeating last night’s misadventure or the idea that everything will be completely normal, proving my sense of reality to be faulty and untrustworthy.

What bothers me most is how much last night bothers me. When I really think about it, not much happened, or at least, nothing to be too concerned about. My friend walked in his sleep, a weird, one-off occurrence which was, of course, creepy, but ended without violence or danger. It’s only natural that this wild landscape should feel so eerie in the middle of the night, being so unfamiliar to my usual surroundings and even more alien now that I’m accompanied by only one person. Even if everything did happen exactly as I remembered it, none of it was anything to be frightened of. If I were to tell the story to anyone else, it would feel anticlimactic, a non-story, an anecdote at best. “We were sleeping in the woods and my buddy sleep walked through the creek! It really freaked me out.” It’s not much, when I think of it that way.

I should at least try to sleep. I’ll need the energy to make the remaining distance tomorrow.

5.

I woke up again in the middle of the night. This time, it wasn’t a sudden swallowing of sound that alarmed me, but the sensation of being watched. For such a terrifying feeling, it was also oddly nostalgic - something I hadn’t felt since childhood, staring into the shadowy corner of my bedroom from under the tenuous safety of the covers, sure that the silhouette of a chair was the form of a still and silent man. Such a sensation has a paralyzing nature, as the brain plays tricks on itself, believing that the body’s stillness would translate to the stillness of the implacable form in the dark, rendering it benign. And yet, if you spend long enough staring, the man in the dark grows taller, or shifts slightly on his feet, or even rushes to another corner of the bedroom, and your breath seizes so intensely that you feel as if your very heart has stopped beating. That childish instinct urged me to cover my eyes and stay hidden in my sleeping bag, as if that would keep me safe, but being old enough to know that wouldn’t help, I forced myself to assess my surroundings for danger.

Like the night before, the light of the stars couldn’t seem to reach the earth, leaving my eyes straining. I managed to make eye contact, not with Jeremy (who was still asleep), but with a small creature crouched low to the ground a short distance from my feet. Its eyes possessed a soft glow, were wide and vigilant. A few more seconds passed and I recognized the sharp snout and pointed ears of a coyote. It kept all four paws planted firmly on the ground. Its only response to my slight movements was to keep watching - there was no twitch in the ear, tail, or nose. Only the unwavering stare of its eyes.

Once I understood what I was looking at, I saw the prowling animals surrounding us from all sides. Neither encroaching nor fleeing, they circled and shifted, a phantasmagoric performance of meaningless movement. In the near absence of light, they were like silvery phantoms dancing on the edges of my sight, so that I almost doubted their very existence. Their paws made only the quietest of shuffling sounds against the dirt, needles, and underbrush. As they swished their tails back and forth, they left arcs of dull light imprinted on my vision. The world looked like a failed photo print left to sit unclaimed in a darkroom.

We’d left our backpacks tied to high, out-of-reach branches in the hopes of keeping our food away from predators, but the smell could still have attracted them. That’s what I thought as I lay there, but now I’m not so sure that’s what they were after.

I stood up slowly and raised my arms out to make myself bigger. I spun around, yelling and stomping at the circumference of coyotes. If such a strategy could work on bears, why not coyotes? Yet they didn’t move. And, oddly enough, Jeremy also did not stir. His snoring ceased and his breathing grew shallow, but his eyes remained shut, and he didn’t toss or turn from the disturbance.

Jeremy parted his lips slightly and emitted a hum. I saw it resounding through his chest and throat, a visible and enthralling vibration shivering up and down the length of his body. I know the sound came from him, but it was utterly inhuman; it was unlike anything a living being should be able to produce. I struggle to compare it to anything familiar, and my memory seems too weak to keep a firm hold on it. The sensation of it presently escapes me, coming loose in tendrils even as I try to hold it close and preserve it. The closest sound I can think of is the moans of tectonic plates shifting under the earth’s surface, those eerie creaks that scientists record and put into dramatic nature documentaries about volcanoes or earthquakes. Or perhaps wind howling through the deepest portions of a canyon, so harsh and otherworldly that the invisible source is molded by human brains into the grieving of ghosts. Jeremy’s hum was oceanic and ancient, a symphony of infinite water, rock, wind, and gravity. As if inside his body were the deepest chasm on the earth.

The sound shot the coyotes through with what could only be described as a collective ecstasy. Some howled along with the noise, sounding like infants crying for their mother. Others were sent into seizure-like convulsions on the ground. Many of them simply ran around in circles, not chasing nor running from anything, but channeling pure, unadulterated energy in the best way they knew how. They looked like the congregation in the throes of possession. The primal ritual ended suddenly and the emerging silence made me worry all of the coyotes had dropped dead. I couldn’t see them well enough to know if they were still moving and breathing, nor could I tell Jeremy’s condition. I crouched next to him and tried to shake him awake, but only succeeded in jarring him into his usual snoring. This sudden return of a mundane, innocuous sound woke all of the coyotes from their stupor, and they took off in a pack toward what I believe must have been the south, though with how disconcerted I was, there’s no way to know for certain.

I didn’t sleep at all after that. The coyotes never came back. I’m now exhausted but wired with nervous energy, as if I’ve been pumped full of far more caffeine than the human body can handle. My heart races, my hands shake as I write. Jeremy, once again, doesn’t believe me. He asked if I’d eaten anything from the woods or taken one of the acid tabs we’d brought on the trip without telling him. But I’m certain I’ve only eaten what we brought in our bags and I left the acid tabs at camp with the others. Jeremy mumbled something about mold in the food supply and finding a doctor. He’s not nagging me about it but he’s clearly worried, used to being in complete confidence and control during his hikes. He’s rushing us out this morning without breakfast, giving me barely enough time to record what happened.

I don’t think I’m sick, but either way, I’m ready to get out of here.

6.

We’re in town now, but my worry hasn’t subsided. I’m in a barren McDonald’s waiting for Jeremy to get out of the auto shop. I’m the only one here besides some kid working at the counter. The solitude here makes me uneasy, but I’m hungry as hell and even more tired, so I remain waiting. I’m still not quite sure I understand how we got here, but I’ll recollect everything to the best of my ability.

Today, around noon, we reached Jeremy’s car, parked at a secluded trailhead. We’d come upon it much earlier than we anticipated. What should have been a welcome surprise was disorienting. Had we really hiked that much further than we’d thought over the past few days? Perhaps the landmarks we used to judge distance weren’t as reliable as we thought. Despite my misgivings, I was still more than happy to throw my sore, heavy body into the passenger seat, coffee stains, cigarette burns, and all. Jeremy started up the car and checked the gas. We had more than enough to get the others and bring them into the nearest town before nightfall, so we could get Lindsay into a clinic and find motel rooms for the night. The tantalizing hints of returning normalcy soothed my nerves and even revitalized me.

We embarked on the road toward the trailhead closest to camp, blasting the only radio station that we could somewhat discern through the static that obscured every station - some “gospel and hymn” broadcast. Jeremy and I would normally have preferred silence to church music, which reminded me of long, dull hours spent at Sunday school, but by that time, anything was better than the silence. Jeremy’s cassette player had been broken for years, so we were left with the ominous choirs and intermissions of preachers’ booming voices, speaking of the everlasting battle between God and the Devil.

After only half an hour of driving, the radio went out and the car sputtered and stalled, before jarring to a stop and refusing to start again. This was when Jeremy noticed that we’d somehow lost three quarters a tank of gas in that short time. We got out to check for leaks, and Jeremy popped open the hood but saw nothing unusual. It was strange, as we should have been able to keep driving with the remaining gas at least, but even with me pushing from the back and Jeremy trying to start the car, we couldn’t get it going. After some deliberation, we accepted that we would have to hike even more, to where I’d parked my own car, at a trailhead 20 miles further north. Just as we reached this decision and resigned ourselves to another night in the woods, a huge, rusted pickup truck rounded the bend in the road and stopped next to us. The truck looked like something straight out of the 70s, once painted a pale sky blue but now a collage of orange rust, scrapes, and mud. The driver’s side door opened and an old woman thrust her head out.

I was surprised by the woman’s frail body and gnarled fingers. Her hair was ghostly white and thick, hanging down her back in an untamed, frizzy mess. Yet her voice and eyes were as sharp, if not sharper, than any young person’s.

“You boys need a ride,” she said. My mind forced me to recognize it as a question, but she uttered it as a statement.

Jeremy and I exchanged a look, unable to believe our luck.

“Yeah, we need to get to our other car. It’s in the same direction you’re going, so I hope it’s not too much trouble,” Jeremy said.

“Well, get in, then,” the woman said, reaching back to unlock the back doors and settling herself back behind the wheel.

We slid into the cramped backseat and were startled by a previously unnoticed presence in the passenger seat. It was a girl of 13 or 14, who must have been the woman’s granddaughter. She had long, downy hair the color of raw honey, and a thin, freckled face that had clearly seen much sun. Her dirt-stained bare feet rested on the dash. She assessed Jeremy and I as if we were abstract paintings she couldn’t quite grasp the point of.

“I’m Fortune,” she said, and then just stared at us.

“Uh… Nick,” I said, awkwardly. Jeremy introduced himself with equal uncertainty.

It’s strange how difficult it was for us to talk to a child when we’re barely out of childhood ourselves, but nonetheless, Fortune made us both unsure and so we directed most of our questions to the old woman instead.

“What brought you two out here today?” I asked, trying to be polite.

“We’re just heading home,” the old woman said, which wasn’t really an answer to my question, but I didn’t press further. The old woman followed up: “you’re a bit further from home than we are. All the way from Kansas. That’s a bit of a drive.”

I made small talk on driving and weather and the landscapes of Colorado and Kansas, never once finding it odd that she knew where we were from. I figured a license plate or something had tipped her off, and only now am I realizing Jeremy’s car has Colorado plates. I’m trying to tell myself it was an educated guess - surely it’s common for Kansans to make their way onto the Colorado Trail - but…

The two women were somehow immensely talkative while also vague and ambiguous in their phrasing. Their anecdotes were evasive, slippery, like water falling through cupped hands. I can’t quite say anything certain about them except for the girl’s name. They didn’t ask questions, but rather, made assertions which coaxed responses out of us as if we had been asked something. This stilted rhythm of dialogue left me with a sense of powerlessness, as if I were at the mercy of some great and powerful judge whose sense of the world was far beyond mine.

So weird was the situation that I didn’t notice we’d approached the proper trailhead until we were stopped next to my car. The old woman turned around to look at us for the first time since we got into the truck.

“Don’t test your luck too much out here,” she said. “It will run out eventually.”

I was too stunned to respond. Her words sent images of the past few nights rushing through my head. I remember thinking: if that was lucky, I didn’t even want to know what unlucky might look like. Instead, we thanked the woman hurriedly, pretending as if we didn’t hear her, and jumped out of the truck. We waved at Fortune as her grandmother pulled away and the girl gave us a pair of theatrical peace signs as a goodbye. From Fortune, the silly gestures of a child felt more like a spell of unknown intentions being cast over us. I had driven my car all the way to town for food, gas, and a jumper cable before I realized I had never told the woman where my car was parked. At least, I don’t remember telling her.

I mean, I must have, right?

The comfort I expected from a burger, fries, and soda does not arrive as I eat in this lonely place. This might as well be a ghost town, one which I don’t remember driving through, (though I must have), one of those places you never even bother to learn the name of and which looks just like every other not-quite-a-town that populates the desolate highways of America, with its selection of four fast food restaurants, three gas stations, an autoshop, a motel, a video store, and at least one unsavory establishment - like a casino or an adult video shop. The people who work in these buildings, where do they live? Where do their children go to school? The dissonance of these places has always stumped me. They’re built as neon oases for truck drivers and nothing more. This one looks exactly like the ones in Pennsylvania or Georgia or Wyoming or California or Texas… all the same, all corpses of towns, barely even considered as such.

I can’t consult my broken watch to figure out how long Jeremy has been at the auto shop, but I feel like I’ve been waiting here for close to an hour. Ever since that first night away from the camp, I haven’t been able to trust my perception of time. It’s like the world has stretched thin in some areas and bloated in others, creating a subtle disorientation that can never be fully recognized as a state of confusion, but which perplexes me nonetheless. I wonder if maybe Jeremy is right and I did eat something bad and I’m slowly slipping into delirium. The only other times I’ve felt this way have been in the midst of a fever while fighting off a flu or stomach bug. I’d assumed everything would go back to normal once we returned to civilization, but it hasn’t. So either I’m sick, or this town is just as sideways as the woods.

I’m trying to push all of these strange thoughts aside. As long as we can get the others safely home, I can put this all behind me. Soon enough, I’ll be safe at home and this will all be a fun story to tell, nothing more.

7.

They’re gone.

We went back to get them, Lindsay and the others, we went to the exact place we left them, but there’s no sign we were ever even there. No tents, no smoldering fire pit, no footprints. Four people, vanished.

Jeremy, in his newly fueled and jumped car, went to go get the ranger, and sent me back to town to call the police. I called from the motel and I’m waiting in the parking lot. Jeremy says we must have taken too long, the others got tired of waiting and decided to hike back in on their own, and if we mobilize search and rescue, they’ll be found by the morning. I don’t know if he believes any of that, but that’s what he said.

I stay in my car with static blasting from the speakers to drown out the silence falling over the town, that dreadful silence which has expanded beyond the trail all the way out here, like it’s following, like it’s consuming and growing. The sky’s light is swallowed again, and the neon signs of the motel and restaurants and gas stations cut words into the darkness without illuminating their surroundings at all. I wait in my car for police that I’m not sure will ever come, and I’m wondering not where my friends went, but what took them.

What Jeremy and I barely escaped from.