Part 1

It was 2010, and my world had just crumbled. I was 17 years old, living in Oregon, and I had just received the news that my father—my hero—had suddenly passed away.

It sent a shockwave through our entire family. We were close, the kind of family that did everything together. One of our favorite things was heading up to our cabin near Mount Bachelor. It was our sanctuary. We spent winters there skiing, snowboarding, and just being together. But after Dad was gone, the cabin didn’t feel like a sanctuary anymore. It felt like a hollow reminder of what we had lost.

My mom decided to sell it. I was devastated, but I understood. Before the sale went through, I asked her for one favor: “Can I go up there one last time?” I wanted to say goodbye to the place, to the memories, and in a way, to him. She agreed.

I loaded up my dad’s old car—which he had left to me—grabbed my dog, Midnight, and drove up into the mountains. My plan was simple: eat junk food, play video games, and soak in the silence of the forest for a few days.

The cabin was unique. The back half was built directly into the mountainside, meaning there were no windows in the rear, just solid earth and rock. The front, however, was all glass—beautiful, floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over a small clearing. Beyond that clearing was a dense, towering wall of pine trees.

Right at the edge of the woods stood what we called the “Sitting Tree.” It had a massive branch about 20 feet up that grew parallel to the ground, looking like a perfect bench. But there were no lower branches to climb; it was just this high, unreachable perch looking directly into our living room.

The first two days were exactly what I needed. It was peaceful. I felt close to my dad. But on the third day, the atmosphere shifted.

A heavy snowstorm had hit the night before, dumping feet of fresh powder. I decided to stay inside, just me and Midnight. Around noon, I let the dog out to do her business. That’s when I saw them.

Fresh footprints.

They weren’t mine. I hadn’t left the cabin all day. They started from the deep woods, cut across the clearing right in front of my door, and banked around toward the back of the cabin where the house met the mountain.

I stood there in the freezing cold, staring at the tracks. My nearest neighbors were miles away and elderly; they wouldn’t be trekking through thigh-deep snow. I tried to tell myself it was a lost hiker or maybe a hunter, but the way the tracks moved… it felt purposeful.

I went back inside and locked the door, feeling a knot of anxiety tighten in my stomach. Night began to fall, and the woods around Mount Bachelor turned pitch black. I didn’t know it yet, but the isolation I had craved was about to turn into my biggest nightmare.

Midnight, who was usually calm, suddenly jumped off the bed and ran downstairs, her ears pinned back. She started growling at the front door.

Part 2

The silence of an Oregon winter night is heavy. It’s not just the absence of noise; it’s a physical weight, a thick blanket of muffled stillness that presses against your eardrums. In the city, or even in the suburbs, there’s always a hum—traffic on a distant highway, the buzz of a streetlamp, the settling of a neighbor’s house. But up here, on the side of Mount Bachelor, surrounded by millions of pine trees loaded with snow, the silence was absolute.

Until Midnight moved.

I was lying in the master bedroom, the heavy duvet pulled up to my chin. The heat in the cabin had been cranked up, but a draft still managed to find its way through the old window frames, carrying that distinct, sharp scent of pine needles and ice. I had just started to drift off, that hazy space between waking and dreaming where your thoughts stop making sense. Midnight, my Golden Retriever, was curled up in her usual spot at the foot of the bed, a warm, reassuring lump of fur.

Then, she stiffened.

It wasn’t a subtle shift. It was instantaneous. One second she was dead asleep, and the next, she was rigid, vibrating with tension. I felt it through the mattress. I opened my eyes, staring at the dark wooden beams of the ceiling, listening.

“Mid?” I whispered, my voice sounding too loud in the quiet room.

She didn’t look at me. She was sitting up now, her head cocked, staring intently at the open doorway of the bedroom. Beyond that door lay the small landing and the staircase that led down to the main living area. Her ears were swiveled forward, straining to catch a sound I couldn’t hear.

Then, she let out a low, guttural growl.

Now, you have to understand something about Midnight. She was the definition of a lover, not a fighter. She was the kind of dog who would greet a burglar with a wagging tail and a request for belly rubs. She barely barked at squirrels. To hear a growl like that—deep, vibrating in her chest, menacing—sent a spike of adrenaline straight into my heart. It was a sound I associated with wolves, not family pets.

“What is it, girl?” I sat up, reaching for the lamp on the bedside table. I clicked it on, bathing the room in soft, yellow light.

Midnight didn’t react to the light. She leaped off the bed, her claws clicking sharply on the hardwood floor, and sprinted out of the room. I heard her paws thudding down the stairs, not in a playful romp, but with urgency.

My mind immediately raced through the logical explanations. Maybe a raccoon had gotten onto the porch. Maybe a bear was rummaging through the trash cans I’d left secured on the side of the house. Or maybe she just really, really needed to pee.

But the memory of those footprints I’d seen earlier that day flashed in my mind. The ones that came out of the dense tree line, circled the front of the cabin, and disappeared around the back. I had rationalized them away hours ago—a lost hiker, a neighbor checking property lines—but now, in the dark, that rationality felt thin and brittle.

I threw off the covers, shivering as the cold air hit my skin. I grabbed my phone—no service, of course—and pulled on a pair of sweatpants. “Midnight, come here!” I called out, trying to keep my voice steady.

She didn’t come back. I could hear her downstairs, pacing. It was a frantic, rhythmic sound. Click-click-click-click. Back and forth in front of the front door.

I sighed, rubbing my face. “Okay, okay, I’m coming,” I muttered to myself. I was trying to be annoyed because annoyance is easier to deal with than fear. If I was just annoyed that my dog woke me up to pee, then everything was normal. If I was scared, it meant I acknowledged something was wrong.

I walked out to the landing and looked down into the living room. It was pitch black down there. The floor-to-ceiling windows that made the cabin so beautiful during the day were now towering walls of obsidian. They reflected nothing but the faint ambient light of the snow outside, creating ghostly shapes that looked like they were moving whenever I turned my head.

I went down the stairs, turning on lights as I went, carving a path of safety through the darkness. When I reached the bottom, Midnight was practically vibrating at the front door. She looked at me, then back at the door, then back at me, letting out a sharp whine.

“Alright, easy,” I said, crouching down to ruffle her ears. She was trembling. Not from cold—she was an Oregon dog, built for this weather—but from excitement? Fear? I couldn’t tell. Her body was taut as a bowstring.

I assumed she had to go to the bathroom. That was the only reason she’d ever be this insistent at 2:00 AM. I grabbed my heavy coat off the rack, shoved my feet into my unlaced boots, and put my hand on the deadbolt.

As the metal lock clicked back, the sound echoed like a gunshot in the quiet house. I turned the handle and pulled the heavy wooden door open.

The cold hit me like a physical blow. It was easily ten degrees below zero, the air so dry and frigid it burned my lungs instantly. The snow from the storm had stopped, leaving the world covered in a fresh, pristine layer of white powder that glowed under the moonlight. The sky was clear now, millions of stars staring down, indifferent to the small, warm box of light I was standing in.

“Go on,” I urged Midnight, stepping aside.

Usually, she would bolt out, dive into a snowbank, and do her business immediately because of the cold.

This time, she didn’t move.

She stood on the threshold, her nose twitching violently, taking in the scents of the night. She took one tentative step onto the porch, her head lowered, stalking. She wasn’t looking for a spot to squat. She was hunting. Or maybe, she was being hunted.

She moved slowly to the edge of the porch, looking out across the clearing. The driveway was buried, invisible under the snow. The only thing breaking up the white expanse were the trees.

And that’s when she froze.

She was staring directly toward the “Sitting Tree”—that massive pine with the horizontal branch about twenty feet up. It was maybe fifty yards away, standing like a sentry at the edge of the dense forest.

I squinted, trying to see what she was seeing. The moonlight cast long, distorted shadows across the snow. The trees looked like jagged teeth against the night sky. The Sitting Tree was just a silhouette, a dark blotch against the darker woods.

“What do you see, girl?” I whispered. The steam from my breath swirled in front of my face, momentarily obscuring my vision.

Midnight let out a low, menacing growl again, the hair on her back standing straight up. She wasn’t looking at a squirrel. A squirrel doesn’t make a seventy-pound retriever freeze in terror.

I stepped out onto the porch, the snow crunching loudly under my boots. I wanted to be brave. I wanted to be the man of the house, the protector. My dad would have marched out there with a flashlight and checked it out. But I wasn’t my dad. I was seventeen, grieving, and suddenly feeling very, very small.

I looked at the Sitting Tree again. I scanned the branch—that perfect, bench-like limb. For a second—just a fraction of a second—I thought I saw a shape. Not a branch, not a clump of snow, but a disruption in the pattern. A vertical shadow intersecting the horizontal branch.

It looked like someone sitting there.

My heart hammered against my ribs. I blinked, rubbing my eyes, trying to clear the sleep and the fear. When I looked back, the shape was gone. It was just a tree. Just shadows and snow. My mind was playing tricks on me, projecting my anxiety onto the landscape. Pareidolia—seeing faces and shapes where there are none.

But Midnight wasn’t hallucinating. She shifted her weight, looking ready to bolt toward the woods.

“No,” I said, my voice shaking. “No, Midnight. Inside.”

She ignored me. She took another step into the snow.

“Midnight! Now!” I grabbed her collar, hauling her back. She resisted for a second, her muscles locked, eyes still fixed on that tree line, before she finally yielded. I dragged her backward into the cabin and slammed the door shut.

I locked the deadbolt. Then the handle lock. Then I engaged the safety chain. It felt ridiculous—three locks against the nothingness of the woods—but I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking.

I leaned my back against the door, sliding down until I hit the floor. My breathing was ragged. Midnight didn’t sit with me. She paced the entryway, sniffing the crack at the bottom of the door, whining softly.

“There’s nothing out there,” I told her, and myself. “It’s just a deer. Or a coyote. It’s fine.”

But the feeling of being watched didn’t vanish with the closing of the door. If anything, it intensified. The cabin, with its wall of windows, suddenly felt like a fishbowl. If there was someone out there, standing in the tree line, they could see everything. They could see me sitting on the floor. They could see me turn off the lights. They could see me terrified.

I stood up and aggressively started closing the blinds. I went from window to window, yanking the cords, shutting out the night. I checked the lock on the sliding glass door to the deck. Locked. I checked the kitchen window. Locked. I went into the downstairs bathroom and checked the tiny window there. Locked.

I was doing a perimeter check like I was in a besieged fortress.

Once the downstairs was sealed up tight—a dark, claustrophobic box—I grabbed Midnight’s collar again. “We’re going upstairs. Now.”

She didn’t want to go. She kept looking back at the front door, her tail tucked between her legs. I practically had to carry her up the stairs.

Back in the bedroom, I shut the bedroom door and locked it. It was a flimsy interior lock, the kind you can pick with a paperclip, but it made me feel slightly better. I turned off the bedside lamp, plunging the room into darkness again.

“Get in bed, Mid,” I commanded.

She refused. Instead of curling up at my feet, she stood by the side of the bed, facing the bedroom door, her body rigid. She was listening.

I lay there in the dark, my eyes wide open, straining my ears. The silence of the house was different now. It wasn’t peaceful. It was pregnant with anticipation. I was waiting for a sound. I didn’t know what sound, but I knew it was coming.

Ten minutes passed. Twenty. My heart rate started to slow down. The adrenaline was fading, replaced by exhaustion. I started to tell myself I was an idiot. I was a city kid spooked by the woods. I was letting my grief over Dad mess with my head. I was projecting his absence into a presence of something else.

Midnight finally sat down, though she didn’t lay her head down. She was still on guard duty, but the immediate crisis seemed to have passed.

I closed my eyes. Just go to sleep, I thought. In the morning, the sun will be up, you’ll pack the car, and you’ll leave. Just get through the night.

And then, I heard it.

Thump.

My eyes snapped open. The sound hadn’t come from downstairs. It hadn’t come from the woods.

It came from directly above my head.

Thump. Thump.

It was the sound of a heavy, deliberate step on the roof.

I stopped breathing. My entire body went cold, a primal freeze response locking my muscles. I stared up at the ceiling, though I could see nothing in the dark. The roof of the cabin was steep—designed to shed heavy snowfall—and it was covered in asphalt shingles. There was no attic, no crawl space between me and the roof. Just a few inches of wood, insulation, and shingle separated me from whatever was up there.

Thump… Scrape… Thump.

It sounded like a boot. A heavy, frozen boot dragging slightly against the grit of the shingles. Or maybe… a hoof? It had a dull, resonant quality to it, heavy and hard.

Midnight went berserk. She didn’t bark, but she let out a sound I’d never heard a dog make—a high-pitched, terrified yip mixed with a snarl. She looked up at the ceiling, tracking the sound. Her head moved from left to right, following the footsteps.

I lay paralyzed. My mind scrambled for a rational explanation. A branch? No, there were no trees close enough to overhang the roof; we kept them cleared for fire safety. Ice sliding off? No, the cadence was rhythmic. Step. Step. Step. Ice slides in a rush, a chaotic crumble. This was walking.

Something is walking on the roof.

The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow. The impossible geometry of it made me nauseous. The roof was twenty-five feet off the ground at the front. The back was buried in the hill, sure, but the pitch was steep and slick with ice. A person couldn’t just casually walk on it without slipping, without climbing gear.

And yet, the footsteps were calm. Measured. Pacing.

They walked from the peak of the roof down toward the eaves right above the balcony, then turned and walked back up toward the peak. Back and forth. Directly over my bed.

It was taunting. That’s what it felt like. It wasn’t trying to be quiet. It wanted me to know it was there.

I reached out and grabbed Midnight, pulling her onto the bed, burying my face in her fur. I needed to feel something warm, something alive. She was trembling so hard she was shaking the entire bed frame.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I whispered into her fur, lying through my teeth.

The footsteps stopped.

The silence that followed was worse than the noise. The footsteps had stopped right above the center of the room. Was it listening? Was it waiting?

I lay there for what felt like an hour, though it was probably only a few minutes. Every muscle in my body hurt from the tension. I was sweating, despite the cold room.

Then, a new sound.

Tap.

It was faint, light. Like a fingernail against glass.

I turned my head slowly toward the sliding glass door that led out to the second-story balcony. The balcony was small, just a little wooden platform jutting out from the master bedroom. I had drawn the heavy blackout curtains across it before bed, so I couldn’t see out.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

It was coming from the balcony door.

The logic of the situation crashed down on me. If something had been on the roof… it had climbed down. It had dropped onto the balcony. And now, it was standing right on the other side of that glass.

There was a thin pane of glass and a piece of fabric separating me from… it.

I knew I shouldn’t look. Every survival instinct in my body screamed at me to stay in bed, to pull the covers over my head, to hide. If I didn’t see it, maybe it wasn’t real. Maybe I could wake up in the morning and pretend it was a dream.

But there is a fatal flaw in human curiosity. When you are terrified, you have to know the source of the terror. You have to define the monster to survive it.

I pushed the covers off. I swung my legs out of bed. My bare feet hit the cold floor. Midnight stayed on the bed, pushed up against the headboard, refusing to move. She was smarter than me.

I walked toward the balcony door. My legs felt like they were moving through molasses. The tapping continued. It wasn’t aggressive. It was gentle. Rhythmic. Tap-tap-tap. Like a friend trying to get your attention.

I reached the curtains. My hand hovered over the fabric. The air coming off the glass was freezing. I could feel the presence on the other side. I could feel eyes boring through the curtain, waiting for me.

Don’t do it, a voice in my head screamed. Don’t you dare do it.

I took a deep breath, grabbed the edge of the curtain, and ripped it open.

I braced myself to scream. I braced myself to see a face pressed against the glass—pale skin, hollow eyes, a twisted grin. I braced myself for a monster.

But there was nothing.

The balcony was empty.

The moonlight flooded into the room, illuminating the snow that had piled up on the railing. The deck boards were bare. There was no seven-foot tall man. No creature. Just the night, the snow, and the silence.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. A hysterical laugh bubbled up in my throat. I’m losing it, I thought. I am actually having a psychotic break.

I unlocked the glass door and slid it open. The cold air rushed in, smelling of ozone and pine. I stepped out onto the small wooden platform, my bare feet burning on the ice-cold wood. I looked left. I looked right. Nothing.

I gripped the railing and leaned out, looking up at the roof.

“Hello?” I yelled. “Is anyone there?”

My voice echoed off the trees, weak and pathetic.

I scanned the shingles. They were coated in a thin layer of frost. And there, etched clearly in the frost, lit by the moon, were marks.

Not just marks. Footprints.

But they weren’t boot prints. They looked… wrong. They were long, narrow, and distorted. And they stopped right at the edge of the roof, directly above where I was standing.

I looked down at the balcony floor, searching for where the intruder had landed. There was no disturbed snow on the railing. No wet footprints on the deck where I stood.

It was as if whatever had walked on the roof had simply evaporated into the air before hitting the balcony.

Then, I heard a sound that froze the blood in my veins.

It came from the ground below. From the darkness of the yard, near the corner of the house.

It was a mimicry. A perfect, distorted recording of a sound I knew well.

It was the sound of my father whistling.

My dad had this specific whistle he used to call us for dinner. Two short bursts, one long. Tweet-tweet-twoooo.

I heard it coming from the shadows of the Sitting Tree. Tweet-tweet-twoooo.

But it sounded wrong. It sounded metallic, raspy, like it was being played through a broken speaker.

I leaned over the railing, shining my flashlight frantically into the yard. The beam cut through the darkness, sweeping over the snow.

“Dad?” I choked out. It was an involuntary reaction. I knew he was dead. I knew he was in the ground. But grief makes you stupid. Grief makes you hope for the impossible.

The beam of my flashlight hit the Sitting Tree.

And there he was.

Or… something.

It was the figure I had seen earlier. The tall man. But now, with the flashlight beam hitting him directly, I saw details that my brain refused to process.

He was crouched on that branch, twenty feet in the air. His limbs were unnaturally long, folded like a spider’s. He was wearing clothes that looked like rags, tattered and grey, blending in with the bark.

But it was his face that broke me.

He was pale, a sickly, moon-white pale. And his mouth was open. unnaturally wide, like a snake unhinging its jaw. He wasn’t whistling with his lips. The sound was coming from deep inside his throat, a ventriloquist act of the dead.

Tweet-tweet-twoooo.

He was staring right at me. His eyes didn’t blink. They reflected the light of my flashlight like a cat’s eyes—glowing yellow-green.

He gripped the branch above him with hands that had too many joints. He didn’t move. He just stared, and whistled my dead father’s call.

I dropped the flashlight.

It clattered onto the balcony floor and rolled off the edge, falling into the snow below, the beam spinning wildly before extinguishing in a snowbank.

Darkness reclaimed the yard.

I didn’t wait to see if he moved. I scrambled backward, tripping over my own feet, falling back into the bedroom. I slammed the glass door shut and locked it. I threw the curtains closed, my hands shaking so badly I almost ripped the fabric.

I backed away from the window until I hit the opposite wall. I slid down to the floor, pulling my knees to my chest. Midnight was under the bed now, whimpering.

“He’s real,” I whispered. “He’s real.”

But the terror wasn’t done.

As I sat there, hyperventilating, trying to comprehend the monstrosity I had just seen, the tapping started again.

But not on the balcony door.

It was coming from the front door, downstairs.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Then, a pause.

Then, the sound of the doorknob jiggling.

The heavy, metal rattle of the handle being turned, tested. The deadbolt held. The chain held.

But then came the heavy thud of a shoulder hitting the wood.

BAM.

The whole house shook.

Midnight let out a shriek from under the bed.

BAM.

He was at the front door. He had come down from the tree in seconds. He moved with a speed that shouldn’t be possible.

I scrambled across the floor and grabbed the landline phone on the nightstand. I put it to my ear, praying for a dial tone.

Silence. The line was dead.

Of course it was dead.

BAM.

The wood of the front door groaned. It was solid oak, but nothing lasts forever.

I looked around the room for a weapon. My dad’s old baseball bat was in the closet. I ran to it, grabbing the smooth wood. It felt light, useless against what I had seen in the tree. You don’t hit a nightmare with a baseball bat.

The pounding downstairs stopped.

I stood there, bat raised, breath hitched. Had he given up?

Then, I heard the footsteps again. Not on the roof. Not on the porch.

On the side of the house.

It sounded like… climbing. Scrabbling. Claws or hard fingernails digging into the wood siding of the cabin. He was scaling the wall.

He was coming up toward the bathroom window. The tiny slit of a window that I had locked. The one that looked directly into the shower.

I watched the bathroom door, which was slightly ajar. I saw the shadow move across the sliver of light coming from the moon.

Scritch. Scratch.

He was right there. Just outside the wall. I could hear his breathing now—heavy, wet, rattling breaths, separated by thin wood and drywall.

I realized then that this wasn’t just an intruder. This wasn’t a burglar. This was a predator playing with its food. He could have broken that window. He could have smashed the door. He was taking his time. He was enjoying the fear.

I retreated to the bed, grabbing Midnight by the collar and dragging her out from underneath.

“We have to hide,” I told her.

But where? The bathroom had a window. The bedroom had the balcony. The downstairs was a glass cage.

There was a small walk-in closet in the master bedroom. No windows. Just a solid door.

I pulled Midnight into the closet, pushing aside my dad’s old flannels and winter coats—clothes that still smelled like him, like Old Spice and sawdust. I sat in the corner, buried in his clothes, holding the bat with one hand and my dog with the other.

I pulled the closet door shut, plunging us into total, suffocating darkness.

And then, we waited.

We waited as the scratching moved around the exterior of the house. We waited as the tapping returned to the balcony door. We waited as the handle of the balcony door rattled violently.

I prayed to a God I hadn’t spoken to in years. I prayed to my dad. Don’t let him in. Please, don’t let him in.

Time lost all meaning. It could have been minutes or hours. The sounds were everywhere. The roof. The walls. The windows. It was like the house was being swarmed, but I knew it was just him. Just the Tall Man moving with impossible speed.

And then, the worst sound of all.

The sound of the sliding glass door latch giving way.

Click.

Whoosh.

The sound of the door sliding open on its tracks. The rush of wind entering the bedroom.

He was inside.

He was in the room, separated from me only by a closet door and a few hanging coats.

I clamped my hand over Midnight’s muzzle. She was trembling so violently she was vibrating against my side. Tears streamed down my face, hot and silent.

I heard his footsteps on the hardwood floor of the bedroom. They weren’t heavy anymore. They were soft. Wet. Like bare feet slapping against the wood.

Slap. Slap. Slap.

He was walking around the bed. He was stopping at the nightstand.

I heard the sound of him picking something up. The phone? The lamp?

Then, the whistling started again.

Tweet-tweet-twoooo.

It was soft this time. A whisper. Right in the room.

Tweet-tweet-twoooo.

He was calling me. He was using my dad’s voice to call me out of the closet.

I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood. I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing I could disappear, wishing I could melt into the floorboards.

The footsteps moved closer to the closet.

Slap. Slap.

They stopped right in front of the door.

I could hear him breathing on the other side. That wet, rattling rasp. I could smell him—a scent of decay, of wet earth and old copper.

The doorknob of the closet slowly, agonizingly, began to turn.

OUTPUT LANGUAGE: English (US)

Part 3

The doorknob turned.

It didn’t rattle. It didn’t shake. It rotated with a smooth, oiled silence that was infinitely more terrifying than violence.

I was sitting on the floor of the closet, pressed into the corner, surrounded by the hanging sleeves of my father’s flannel shirts. They smelled of cedar and old tobacco—the scent of safety. But there was no safety here.

I gripped the baseball bat so hard my knuckles turned white, trembling violently. Midnight was tucked into my side, her head buried under my arm. She wasn’t growling anymore. She was completely silent, a stillness that felt like surrender.

The latch clicked.

The door popped open a fraction of an inch. A sliver of darkness appeared, breaking the seal of our hiding place.

I stopped breathing. My lungs burned, demanding air, but I refused to give them any. I stared at that crack in the door, waiting for an eye. A hand. A claw.

But nothing came through.

Instead, the whistling started again.

Tweet-tweet-twoooo.

It was louder now. Clearer. It wasn’t just a sound; it was a weapon. It was coming from right outside the gap in the door, maybe at waist height, as if whatever was out there was crouching, putting its face right up to the crack to whisper into the dark.

“Dad?”

The voice wasn’t mine. It came from the other side of the door.

My blood turned to ice. It wasn’t a question. It was a recording. It was my own voice, recorded from earlier that night when I had yelled out from the balcony.

“Dad? Dad? Is anyone there?”

The creature was playing my own voice back to me. It sounded tinny, distorted, like audio played through a wet speaker.

Then, a low, wet chuckle. A sound like mud squelching.

I squeezed my eyes shut, tears leaking out hot and fast. It’s intelligent, I realized. It’s not an animal. It’s mocking me.

The door didn’t open further. The creature knew I was in there. It didn’t need to see me. It was savoring the moment, feeding on the terror radiating off me like heat waves.

Then, the pressure on the door vanished.

I heard the wet slapping of bare feet moving away from the closet. Slap. Slap. Slap. They moved across the hardwood floor, back toward the open balcony door.

The wind howled outside, rushing into the room, flapping the curtains.

Then, silence.

I waited. One minute. Two minutes. Five.

My legs were cramping. My heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. Was it a trap? Was it standing right beside the closet door, waiting for me to emerge?

I couldn’t stay in there forever. The cold was seeping into the closet now, the temperature in the room dropping rapidly with the balcony door open. We would freeze if we stayed.

“Mid,” I whispered, barely a breath. “We have to go.”

She whimpered but didn’t fight me this time. She seemed to understand the stakes.

I shifted my grip on the bat. I reached out with my left hand and pushed the closet door. It swung open without resistance.

The bedroom was empty.

The lamp I had heard being moved was lying on the floor, the bulb shattered. The bed was shoved slightly askew. The curtains were billowing wildly in the freezing wind coming through the open sliding glass door. Snow was swirling into the room, coating the rug in a fine white powder.

I didn’t look at the balcony. I didn’t want to know if he was out there.

“Come on,” I hissed.

I scrambled up, my legs numb and clumsy. I grabbed Midnight’s collar and practically dragged her toward the bedroom door. We were halfway across the room when I stepped in something wet.

I looked down.

On the pale rug, right in front of the closet, was a puddle. It wasn’t water. It was thick, dark, and viscous. It smelled of musk and stagnant pond water.

I stepped over it, gagging, and reached the bedroom door. I unlocked it with trembling fingers and threw it open.

The hallway was dark. The stairs loomed ahead, descending into the pitch-black living room.

I didn’t turn on the lights. If he was outside, looking in, the lights would just make me a target. I navigated by memory and the faint blue light of the moon coming through the windows.

We hit the stairs fast. I didn’t care about noise anymore. I just wanted out.

Step. Step. Step.

Halfway down, I froze.

The front door—the heavy oak door I had triple-locked—was wide open.

It hadn’t been kicked in. The lock wasn’t busted. It was just… open. Standing ajar, letting the winter night pour into the living room.

How? My mind screamed. I locked it. I chained it.

Unless… unless he had unlocked it from the inside.

The realization hit me like a physical punch. The footsteps I heard on the roof, then the balcony… he had come in through the balcony, walked downstairs while I was asleep or hiding, unlocked the front door to give himself an exit—or an entrance—and then came back up to torment me.

He had total control of the house.

I was standing exposed on the staircase. The front door was twenty feet away. My car keys were in my pocket. My dad’s car was parked right outside.

“Run,” I whispered to Midnight.

We bolted.

I hit the living room floor and sprinted for the open door. I expected a hand to grab my ankle from under the sofa. I expected the Tall Man to drop from the ceiling.

I burst through the doorway onto the porch.

The cold was shocking, instantly numbing my face. The snow was deep, unplowed.

I looked toward the driveway. The car—a sturdy old Ford Explorer—was there. It was covered in six inches of fresh snow.

“Get in! Get in!” I yelled, fumbling for the keys.

I hit the unlock button on the fob. The headlights flashed. The horn honked once.

HONK.

The sound echoed through the silent forest, a beacon telling everything for miles exactly where we were.

I grabbed the handle of the back door and wrenched it open. “Midnight, up!”

She dove into the back seat. I slammed the door and scrambled for the driver’s side.

I slipped on a patch of ice, my knee hitting the ground hard. I scrambled up, ignoring the pain, and threw myself into the driver’s seat.

I slammed the door and hit the lock button.

Thunk.

Safe. I was in a metal box.

I jammed the key into the ignition and turned it.

Rrerr-rrerr-rrerr.

The engine turned over sluggishly. The cold. The battery was old.

“No, no, no, please,” I begged, hitting the steering wheel. “Come on, Dad. Come on.”

Rrerr-rrerr-VROOOM.

The engine roared to life. Thank God.

I turned on the headlights.

The twin beams cut through the darkness, illuminating the wall of pine trees in front of the cabin.

And there he was.

Standing in the middle of the driveway. Directly in front of the car.

He was impossibly tall. He had to be seven feet, maybe more. His limbs were thin, elongated, covered in that grey, rag-like clothing—or maybe it was skin, I couldn’t tell.

His face was dead white. No nose. Just two slits. And that mouth… that open, gaping maw that hung down to his chest.

He wasn’t moving. He was just standing there, bathed in the halogen glow of the headlights, staring at me through the windshield.

My hands were shaking so hard I could barely grip the wheel. Midnight was barking frantically in the back seat, a feral, terrified sound.

He raised a hand. His fingers were long, tipped with black claws.

He waved.

A slow, mocking wave.

Then, he pointed. Not at me. But behind me.

I looked in the rearview mirror.

In the red glow of the taillights, I saw movement. Shadows. Dozens of them. Emerging from the woods on all sides of the cabin. Smaller figures, crouching, skittering like insects across the snow.

He wasn’t alone.

He was the distraction.

Panic, absolute and blind, took over. I didn’t think. I reacted.

I slammed the car into reverse. The tires spun, whining against the ice, then caught traction. The car lurched backward, fishtailing wildly.

I swung the front end around, aiming away from the cabin, away from the Tall Man.

As the beams swept across the yard, I saw him move. He didn’t run. He loped. He dropped to all fours, his limbs bending at sickening angles, and scrambled up the side of the nearest tree like a spider.

I slammed the gearshift into drive and floored it.

The Explorer roared, kicking up a rooster tail of snow. We shot down the unplowed driveway, bouncing violently over hidden ruts and rocks.

I risked a glance out the side window.

Running parallel to the car, in the tree line, I saw shapes. They were keeping pace with the vehicle. They were fast.

“Go, go, go!” I screamed, mashing the pedal to the floor.

The driveway curved sharply. I hit the brakes too late. The car slid, drifting sideways toward a ditch.

BAM.

The back bumper clipped a tree, shattering the taillight. The impact jarred my teeth, but the car stayed on the road. I corrected the wheel, fighting the slide, and punched the gas again.

We burst out of the tree line and onto the main service road. It was wider here, plowed recently.

I didn’t slow down. I was doing sixty on an icy mountain road, a death wish in any other circumstance, but I didn’t care.

I checked the rearview mirror again.

The road behind me was empty. Just darkness and swirling snow dust.

But I could still hear it. Even over the roar of the engine and the heater blasting full force.

Tweet-tweet-twoooo.

It sounded like it was coming from inside the car.

I screamed, swerving, almost putting us into a snowbank. I looked in the back seat. Midnight was cowered on the floorboards. There was nothing else there.

It was in my head. Or maybe… maybe he was on the roof of the car.

I didn’t stop to check. I drove. I drove like the devil himself was riding shotgun.

I didn’t stop until I saw the lights of Bend, Oregon, twinkling in the distance, forty minutes later. Only when I hit the pavement of the highway, surrounded by streetlights and other cars, did I finally let my foot off the gas.

My hands were frozen in a claw-like grip on the wheel. My shirt was soaked through with sweat.

I pulled into the parking lot of a 24-hour gas station. I put the car in park and killed the engine.

Silence rushed back in. But this time, it was the safe silence of civilization. The hum of a refrigerator unit. The distant sound of a truck on the highway.

I turned around and looked at Midnight. She lifted her head, her eyes wide, panting heavily.

“We made it,” I whispered. “We made it, girl.”

I leaned my head against the steering wheel and started to sob. Great, heaving sobs that tore at my throat. I cried for my dad. I cried for the cabin. And I cried because I knew, with absolute certainty, that the world was not the place I thought it was an hour ago.

I looked out the window at the brightly lit gas station. People were inside buying coffee, gas, snacks. Normal people living normal lives. They had no idea. They had no idea what was watching them from the woods.

I reached for my phone to call my mom. I needed to hear her voice.

As I picked it up, I noticed something on the sleeve of my jacket.

A smudge.

Dark, viscous, smelling of musk and stagnant pond water.

I hadn’t touched the puddle in the bedroom. I had stepped over it.

I looked up at the ceiling of the car.

Right above my head, on the fabric liner of the roof, was a damp, dark stain. And in the center of the stain, a small tear in the fabric.

As if a long, black claw had poked through from the outside, just to let me know he could have taken me whenever he wanted.

Part 4

I didn’t sleep that night.

I sat in the brightly lit lobby of a motel in Bend, watching the automatic doors slide open and closed, holding a cup of stale coffee I couldn’t drink. Midnight lay at my feet, refusing to let me out of her sight. Every time the door opened, I flinched, half-expecting a seven-foot figure to unfold itself from the darkness of the parking lot.

But it was just travelers. Skiers. Truckers.

The next morning, the sun came up bright and blinding against the snow. It looked like a postcard—the beautiful, rugged Oregon landscape. But to me, it looked like a disguise. A pretty mask hiding a rotting face.

I called the police.

I didn’t tell them about the whistling man with the unhinged jaw. I didn’t tell them about the spider-walking or the mimicry. I knew how that would sound. A grieving seventeen-year-old having a mental breakdown.

I told them someone had broken into the cabin. I told them I was chased. I told them there were squatters, maybe a group of them, living in the woods behind our property.

Two deputies met me at the diner where I was eating breakfast. They were kind, burly men with thick mustaches and calming voices. They took my statement. They promised to go up to the cabin and check it out.

“Probably just some kids messing around,” one of them said, pouring syrup on his pancakes. “Or maybe a drifter. We get ’em up there sometimes in the winter looking for shelter. Don’t you worry, son. We’ll clear ’em out.”

I nodded, not believing a word of it. A drifter doesn’t walk on a roof with a 45-degree pitch. A drifter doesn’t have eyes that glow yellow.

I didn’t go back up with them. I gave them the key and told them I’d wait in town. There was no amount of money on earth that could drag me back up that mountain.

Three hours later, my phone rang.

“Mason?” It was the deputy.

“Yeah. Did you find them?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. The static of the radio crackled in the background.

“Well, son… we found something. But it’s… strange.”

My stomach dropped. “What do you mean?”

“The cabin is clear. No one inside. But the place is a mess. Furniture turned over, mud everywhere. And… the roof.”

“The roof?” I asked, gripping the phone.

“Yeah. The shingles are torn up pretty bad. Looks like… well, it looks like a bear got up there. Though I’ve never seen a bear track like this. And the weird thing is…”

“What?”

“There are footprints. Barefoot prints. In the snow. Hundreds of them. They’re all over the roof, the deck, the yard. They go right up to the windows and just… stop. But the weirdest part is the size.”

He hesitated.

“They’re too long, Mason. Human-shaped, but… stretched. Like a basketball player with size 25 feet. And the stride… the distance between the steps is near six feet. No man runs like that.”

I closed my eyes. “What are you going to do?”

“We’re gonna file a report. Vandalism. Maybe animal intrusion. We’ll patrol the area. But honestly, son? If I were you, I’d tell your mom to expedite that sale. You don’t want to be up here alone.”

“I know,” I whispered. “I know.”

I drove home to Portland that afternoon. The drive took three hours, but I checked my rearview mirror every ten seconds.

When I got home, I hugged my mom so hard she lost her balance. I cried again, telling her I missed Dad. That was true. But I was also crying because I had almost joined him.

I never told her the full story. I couldn’t. She was already heartbroken. How could I tell her that the place she and Dad built, the place where we had our happiest memories, was infested with something straight out of hell?

I just told her it felt wrong. I told her the memories were too painful, that the cabin felt cold and empty, and that someone had tried to break in.

She believed me. Or maybe she just saw the terror in my eyes and decided not to push.

We sold the cabin two months later. A nice couple from California bought it. They wanted a vacation home. I remember signing the papers, feeling a sick guilt in my gut. I wanted to warn them. I wanted to scream at them to run, to burn it down, to never go near that tree line.

But I didn’t. I signed my name, took my share of the money, and tried to forget.

I’m 30 years old now. It’s been thirteen years since that night.

I live in the city. A high-rise apartment in Seattle. I like it here. There are lights everywhere. There are people. There are no trees outside my window, just steel and glass and concrete.

But the trauma didn’t stay on the mountain. It followed me, in small, subtle ways.

I can’t sleep in a room with the door open. I can’t sleep without white noise—a fan, a TV, anything to drown out the silence.

And I can’t stand whistling.

If I hear someone whistling on the street—a happy, carefree tune—my heart stops. My hands start to shake. I have to leave the area immediately.

Midnight lived to be fourteen. She was a good dog. But after that trip, she changed. She was never the same happy-go-lucky retriever. She became anxious, clingy. She would bark at empty corners of the room. And sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would wake up growling at the window, even though we were on the tenth floor.

She knew. She remembered.

Sometimes, late at night, when the city is quiet, I think about the Tall Man. I wonder if he’s still there. I wonder if he sits on that branch, watching the new owners through the glass. I wonder if he mimics their voices, calling them into the dark.

I did some research a few years ago. Late-night internet rabbit holes. I looked up Native American legends from the Pacific Northwest. I looked up cryptozoology reports.

I found stories. Stories about the “Stick Indians.” Stories about the Wendigo. Stories about things that live in the high places, the lonely places. Things that mimic men to hunt them. Things that are hungry not for flesh, but for fear.

They say that if you hear your name called in the woods, never answer. They say that if you hear a familiar whistle, turn the other way and run.

I think about the fact that he let me go.

That’s the part that haunts me the most. He was in the car. He poked that hole in the roof. He could have killed me on the highway. He could have ripped the door off the closet.

He didn’t want to kill me. Not then.

He wanted me to spread the fear. He wanted a witness. He wanted me to carry his memory down the mountain, like a virus.

And it worked.

Because now, I’m telling you this story. And now, you know about him too.

And tonight, when you turn off your lights, and you look out your window at the darkness… you might wonder if that shadow by the tree is just a shadow. Or if it’s him.

And if you listen closely, over the sound of the wind…

Tweet-tweet-twoooo.

You might just hear him calling you.

Don’t look. Don’t listen. Just run.

[End of Story]