This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/GlumDrawer4253 on 2024-09-20 03:36:09+00:00.
I’ve lost track of time. Consciousness is slipping in and out of focus for me. Lapses in purposeful thought are escaping me like a fly in the dark. I miss the months of old where I lived in quiet background trauma. I’d rather a lost friend, than a lost mind. Maybe that’s selfish. I think I’m selfish.
I went to the cabin.
Maybe it was last night, maybe it was days ago I couldn’t really tell you. I remembered that I had planned to take some hunters up a drawl a city over. I’m sure they’re rightly pissed I never called back.
I thought hurrying up there, I could get down before sunset, get home, then head to the city in the morning.
I was wrong.
When I pulled into that parking lot, suddenly I was faced with how similar that place still looked. The dead leaves colored Orange, brown, and red layered the ground in a mural of beautiful fall. I felt like a kid again hopping out of the jeep.
I grabbed my revolver, a compass, my phone, a small hunting knife, and the plb. I checked my bag and found the firestarter, a small headlamp and map of the area. I didn’t have time for any snacks or anything. The trail mix was a casualty of war for that trip.
I looked up at the sky, and the sun told me it was giving me two hours max. I trudged up through the entrance passing the sign. A picture posted of the little cabin I’d be exploring. What was I even looking for up there? Your guess was as good as mine.
My hiking boots were finally broken in, they had slowly become my unlucky pair with this odyssey I had taken upon myself.
I was searching for answers, the man with the red chevy, the fisherman, the…when I thought about the fisherman it came back to me. That man at the bank my first trip back on ***********.
A fisherman and the way he cut the fish. Those connections began to make waves in my mind, and I couldn’t help but look behind me. Of course there was nothing but a cool breeze flipping over the trails loose debris.
I continued, racing up the mountain towards my destination. I cleared the trees and looked up to the tsunami of grass that laid ahead. The meadow was slowly dying.
With every step I felt the tension in my legs and hands double. That lone cabin quickly being consumed by the darkness of the sky. I had to make it there. Something told me more than anything I had to be in there. I raced up to the steps and launched through the door. Taking care to step over the weak spot near the entrance, my eyes shot back up.
No one, I quickly closed the door behind me as the last embers of daytime snuffed out. I sat down in a heap on the floor. I grabbed my headlamp and clicked it on. It had 8 hours of life, so I wasn’t worried about it dying on me.
I caught my breath for a few minutes then cursed myself for my panicked running. I always kept my cool in the woods. I’d been trapped out in the night plenty of times and never reacted like that. What the hell was that? Writing this now, I know it was instinct, I know the primal part of my brain was more than correct in making me run.
I moved my head up, the beam following my gaze. I lazily moved my head around the cabin walls looking for my name. New drawings, an old guitar, new lovers and old scrawled across the oak. My eyes finally met with my quarry. I saw it on the back wall, along with a bunch of new graffiti tagged alongside it.
“Simon Lewisman.” I chuckled at the rough carving, nostalgia dulling the senses. Before my head moved down, bringing the light to fall on a carving right below it.
“Clark Cuhtz.” This writing was almost mechanical. Like a stamp. This wasn’t Clarks messy handwriting.
I balled my hand into a fist and pounded the wall.
“What the fuck happened to you Clark?”
I knew right then that was a gravestone. It might as well have said “here lies.” I just knew right then, like I’d always known, that he was gone for good.
My PLB crackled and I took it off my belt. I hit the thing a couple times, and it sounded like a little tune of some sort came through. I knew the melody, but couldn’t place the song. I hit it again and it stopped. I sat in silence for a moment. I assumed it was some kind of interference from a station. But it shouldn’t be on that channel anyways. But again, it’s not impossible.
What came next was.
Three knocks. Evenly spaced out and calm. I dropped the PLB when that noise came. Staring at the door my hand landed on the revolver. I picked up the PLB not taking my eyes off the door.
“T-there’s someone here, you’re going to have to find another place.”
There was a bead of silence filled with the sound of blood pounding in my ears. I coiled like a spring ready to launch at any sign of entry.
“Simon, it’s me.”
My fathers voice. That was the last thing I had expected to hear. I got up half stumbling to the door.
I opened it and in the bright beam of my headlamp lay my father. Looking rather youthful in the white light, he stood there in some hiking gear. The smell of a sweaty trek was all about him.
“D-dad what are you doing here?”
“I knew you were coming up, so…I decided to meet you. I was hoping that I’d catch you before you took off.”
“Y-ya. Come in.” I opened the door for him, and he stepped in. I closed the door quickly, as if all the horrors of the world would rush in if I left it open a second more. It was surreal, him suddenly placed into that time and space. My mind rattled by the carving on the cabin, was now background noise to his disturbance.
He sat down and produced a small metal lamp.
“That thing looks ancient- where’s your electric one.”
“Well, the other one died on me. So, borrowed this one from a friend.”
I sat down studying the walls alight with the orange color spilling from the lamp.
“Well smart of you. Your hiking obsessed son forgot to bring a lamp.”
He smiled at that. So young in that lighting. So young. I saw my father like that, and it made me think about how I was going to be the age he was when he had me. How strange it was to repeat everything that had ever happened over and over.
“What are you doing up here Simon?” The question didn’t come as a surprise. But the answers came with difficulty.
“Clark Dad. I know he’s- he’s been killed.”
“Well of course, he hasn’t shown back up in 10 odd years.” He replied. I guessed the years of living in the Northwest had given him a little bit of a drawl.
“I know. But it’s all so odd. I can’t put it down. Some man attacked me dressed like him. I mean wearing his hair like him, wearing his old T-shirt. It was so strange.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” He pressed.
I looked down.
“I didn’t want you to…think I was crazy.”
“You’re not crazy son. I think you're in your rightness.”
“DAMN RIGHT I AM, what the fuck is going on with this mountain range it’s…it’s not right-” I swung my arm and knocked over the little lantern.
“Ah- shit sorry Dad. Let me fix that.”
I reached out into the dark, my beam locating the metal lamp. I thought about how my Dad enjoyed tech. How he always got the newest stuff.
I went to turn it on as he spoke.
“This range has been here a long time. It eats up travelers. That peak, the hungriest of all. But it has a specific taste son.”
I twisted the valve on the lamp to light it, but I turned first at the strangeness of his speech.
My father was holding a syringe inching towards me. His youthful featuresm sharp and sinister in tone. I swung the lamp hard into his hand.
“D-Dad-”
He launched up towards me and I was in a fight for my life. His thin limbs had a strength and dexterity unbefitting of a computer tech.
His hands grasped my neck and in that moment I knew he could kill me. Air seeping from me a scarier thought entered my oxygen starved brain.
He doesn’t want to kill me.
My fingertips grazed the handle of the oil lamp and swung it into his face. Stunned long enough for me to grab the syringe, I stabbed the thing deep in his chest, draining the liquid. He gasped and I cried out a deep groan of regret. My father was stabbed in the chest. I had done it. I stumbled from the cabin and began running as I heard him coughing and sputtering.
This is where time begins to slip away in my mind.
I was running, running and running. Sometimes downhill, sometimes up in the darkness. The beam of my headlamp always guiding me to some other patch of godforsaken forest.
Eventually I was walking, just so tired from the hike. I must’ve been completely lost. I heard voices sprouting up from the deep abyss of unfamiliar wood.
“Simon come back.” Father.
“Hey, I think he’s over here! Simon! Your girlfriend got worried, are you out here?” Some rescuer? No, there’s no way she sent someone. Not that soon.
I forced my legs to move, and next thing I remember I was crawling on all fours from the parking lot entrance to my jeep door. My clothes were half torn, my hands were rubbed half raw and bloody from the distance I must’ve crawled on them.
I fumbled with my keys, the world filled with the sound of the metal things being shoved into the car door handle.
Everything else was silent.
Driving comes back in and out of memory. I know I was driving erratically, I know the road only led one way.
But everytime I blinked I’d be driving my way ...
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