Where the Trees Watch – Chapter 18
The Direction It Wanted Them to Go
The figure on the camera screen remained motionless between the trees, its pale smiling face distorted slightly by static flickering across the footage. The raised finger continued pointing silently toward the darkness deeper ahead in Blackwood.
Ryan felt his heartbeat pounding painfully while Claire stepped farther away from the camera instinctively.
“That thing isn’t behind us,” she whispered.
She was right.
Ryan slowly turned again toward the trail they had just run through. Fog drifted quietly between towering black pines, but nothing stood there. No movement. No smiling figure.
Yet on the camera screen—
the thing still watched them.
Ryan Mercer looked back toward the footage carefully. The figure hadn’t moved at all except for the raised hand indicating the path ahead.
Mason suddenly grabbed the camera from Ryan and shut it off immediately.
“We don’t follow anything it wants.”
The guide’s voice sounded sharper than before, almost desperate.
Claire rubbed shakily at her arms while glancing around the forest. Darkness had deepened considerably during the last hour. The trees overhead blocked nearly all remaining daylight now, leaving only cold gray fog drifting through endless trunks stretching deeper in every direction.
Then Ryan noticed something strange.
The whistles had stopped.
Completely.
No wind either.
The forest had gone silent again.
Mason noticed too.
“That’s worse.”
Before Ryan could ask what he meant, a distant metallic sound echoed softly through the trees ahead.
Clang.
A trail bell.
Then another answered farther away.
Clang.
Clang.
Ryan stared into the fog while uneasiness tightened through his chest. The bells sounded arranged somehow. Deliberate.
Like markers.
Claire quietly whispered, “Do you think they’re leading somewhere?”
Mason immediately shook his head.
“They’re herding us.”
The metallic ringing continued ahead through the darkness, each bell slightly farther than the last. Ryan hated how much the sounds resembled someone guiding lost hikers through fog-covered woods.
The forest path suddenly widened without warning.
The three of them stepped into another open stretch between the trees and immediately stopped.
The ground ahead was covered in photographs.
Hundreds of them scattered across damp earth and moss beneath the pines.
Ryan slowly crouched beside the nearest photo while cold dread spread through him.
Every photograph showed people inside Blackwood.
Hikers.
Campers.
Forest crews.
Search teams.
Some pictures looked decades old, faded and damaged from moisture. Others appeared recent enough to have been printed only weeks ago.
And in every photograph—
someone had been scratched out violently.
Claire picked up another picture nearby with trembling hands. “What the hell…”
Ryan looked closer at the photo she held.
Three hikers standing beside a river somewhere inside Blackwood smiling toward the camera.
Except one figure in the middle had been completely carved away from the image.
Not crossed out.
Removed.
The paper itself scratched through until only empty white tears remained where the person should have been.
Mason stared at the photographs surrounding them with visible horror now.
“We need to keep moving.”
Ryan grabbed another photo from the ground.
This one showed a forest ranger standing outside a firewatch tower.
Tower Four.
The ranger smiled toward the camera holding a coffee mug beneath fog-covered pine trees.
Ryan froze immediately.
It was Walter’s brother.
Elliot Hayes.
But someone else stood beside him in the original photo.
Or had stood beside him.
That entire person had been violently scratched out of existence. Only jagged tears remained across the photograph where the figure once appeared.
Then Ryan noticed something worse.
Fresh photos lay scattered closer ahead.
Newer ones.
Photographs of their own group hiking through Blackwood earlier that afternoon. Claire filming near the checkpoint. Mason leading them through the trail.
And in every single photo—
Ryan had been scratched out.