THE LAST TESTAMENT OF MIKE GARRETT: THE SECRET THE CASCADES NEVER LET ME FORGET

I have spent more than thirty years watching the woods—truly watching them, not the way tourists or weekend hikers glance around while thinking about their next photograph or their next meal. I mean listening to the slow breath of the trees, the ancient groan of old bark shifting in winter wind, the soft footfalls of deer moving cautiously over frost-bitten soil, the crack of a branch under the weight of something far heavier than any animal that should roam these forests. People say the wilderness is quiet, but that’s only because they don’t know how to hear it. The forest speaks constantly. And after three decades as a ranger, I thought I had learned every language it had. But nothing—not grief, not training, not wisdom—prepared me for the day the forest spoke back in a voice I was never meant to hear.

My name is Mike Garrett. For thirty-three years I served the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, stationed deep in the Cascade Range, about forty miles northeast of Mount Rainier. I am not a man prone to fantasy. I don’t believe campfire stories. I spent most of my life debunking them. When you spend long enough in the woods, you understand that most mysteries have explanations, most fears dissolve in daylight, and most so-called monsters reveal themselves to be nothing more than shadows and imagination. But that’s the thing about legends, isn’t it? They remain stories—until the moment they look you in the eyes.

It was November 14th, 1992, late afternoon, the last skeleton days of autumn when the air tastes of woodsmoke and frost and the light thins out early. I was fifty-five years old then, living alone in a ranger cabin three miles off the nearest logging road. I’d asked for the isolation after my wife Sarah died of ovarian cancer three years earlier. I needed the silence the way drowning men need air. People meant well, but their sympathy was like hands tugging at me from every direction. The forest, at least, demanded nothing except attention. And attention I could give.

That day I was preparing my fishing gear by the tributary of the Nisqually River. I remember the exact temperature—forty degrees—because I had glanced at the old mercury thermometer on my porch before heading to the water. The sun slanted low, the sky turning a faint gold, the kind of evening where you grab your Zebco rod and expect nothing more extraordinary than a couple of trout and a quiet meal. I had one hand on a nightcrawler, trying to thread it onto the hook, when I heard it: a sound that did not belong in any forest on Earth.

It began as a deep vibration, low and resonant, like wind passing through a massive hollow trunk—but thicker, heavier, almost metallic. It rumbled through my ribs, as if the earth were speaking from below the roots. I froze instantly. That’s instinct, not fear. I knew every sound in those woods: the scream of a mountain lion, the hoarse bark of elk, the territorial call of birds, the growl of a black bear with cubs nearby. But this wasn’t animal. This wasn’t natural. It was something older, deeper, and entirely wrong.

The forest responded before I did. Everything fell silent—so silent my ears rang from the sudden absence of sound. No birds. No river babble. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath. The silence felt alive, watching me, waiting for my reaction. My fingers slipped away from the fishing rod. My other hand instinctively closed around the canister of bear spray at my belt, though something in my bones told me that whatever made that sound would laugh at bear spray.

Then I saw the branches.

About sixty feet into the trees, there was a path of broken limbs—massive limbs—snapped eight feet off the ground. The fresh fractures glowed white in the fading light, a trail carved by something tall, heavy, and recently moving through. As I took a hesitant step forward, the air changed. A musky scent rolled across me, thick and pungent, reminiscent of wet dog intertwined with the sharp musk of a male black bear—but layered with something else. Something I can only describe as ancient, primal, and unsettlingly familiar, like the forest itself sweating fear.

I should have gone back to the cabin. I should have radioed dispatch. But grief does strange things to a man. My heart was already a cracked vessel, and loneliness had hollowed out everything inside. So instead of retreating, I stepped toward the broken branches. One step. Then another. My boots sank softly into damp earth as twilight drained away the colors of the world, leaving only blue shadow and instinct.

When I saw it move, my first thought was that a shadow had detached itself from the trunk of a Douglas fir. But shadows don’t breathe. They don’t possess mass or intention. And they certainly don’t turn their heads to look directly at you. It stood between two towering trees, its shape immense, its fur a dark, matted brown. Eight feet tall, maybe more, with shoulders wide enough to break a doorway, arms hanging to mid-thigh. But it was the face that fractured my sense of reality: a flat plane with a heavy brow ridge, a wide nose, and eyes—God, those eyes—amber and reflective, like polished lantern glass, yet undeniably intelligent. They examined me with curiosity, caution, and something hauntingly close to sorrow.

We stared at each other. I don’t know for how long. Could’ve been thirty seconds. Could’ve been a lifetime.

Then it raised one hand—slowly, gently—and gestured.

Toward itself.

Then deeper into the forest.

It wanted me to follow.

Every ranger instinct screamed at me to turn back. Every logical neuron fired in warning. But grief, loneliness, and the profound understanding that this creature was not threatening me but asking something of me—those things overpowered reason. So I whispered, without intending to:

“Okay.”

It turned and moved, its gait smooth and impossibly silent for something so large. I followed like a man walking through the remnants of a dream. We walked twenty minutes, maybe more, climbing into older growth, trees that had been ancient long before my grandparents were born. Then we stepped into a clearing I had never seen on any map.

At first glance, it looked like any other clearing—soft earth, pine needles, a ring of towering trees. But something felt wrong. The air was heavy, dense. The silence was thicker than any forest silence I’d known.

Then I saw the objects.

A blue Jansport backpack, faded by sun and rain. A pair of Vasque hiking boots still neatly laced. A red fleece jacket. A Nikon camera lying next to a cracked strap. A wallet. Car keys with a Mount Rainier wooden keychain. Scattered in small clusters, like the remnants of tiny camps.

Dozens of them.

This wasn’t lost gear.

This was a graveyard of belongings.

I knelt beside the blue backpack and opened it. Inside, wrapped in mold and time, was a sleeping bag, a half-rotted water bottle, and a driver’s license: Jennifer Hartley, age 24. Missing since 1987.

My throat tightened. My breath felt thin. I looked up at the creature.

“What is this place?” I whispered. “What happened to them?”

It didn’t answer with words—how could it? But it gave a low, mournful hum. Then it gestured again—this time toward the far end of the clearing. That was when I noticed the shimmer.

Ten feet ahead, the air rippled—not like heat, but like reality itself was bending. The tree line behind it distorted as though seen through warped glass. The creature rumbled sharply when I stepped closer.

A warning.

Do not go into it.

Cold understanding prickled across my spine. Missing hikers. Disappearances with no trace. No remains. No bodies ever found.

They had walked into this.

And something beyond our world had taken them.

The creature wasn’t responsible.

It was guarding this place.

It was gathering the belongings as memorials.

It was trying—desperately—to keep others away.

And now it had brought me here so I would understand.

Something shifted inside me then, something I thought had died with Sarah. Empathy, connection, purpose—things I hadn’t felt in years. I looked at the creature, and in its eyes I saw an echo of my own grief. It was alone. It had been alone for God knows how long, trying to protect a world that didn’t even know it existed.

“I won’t tell,” I whispered. “I won’t bring anyone here. But I need to understand. I need to help.”

It watched me for a long moment, then settled into a sitting position—a gesture of acceptance.

Two beings who should never have met, sitting side by side in the last light of a dying day.

That was the beginning.

Over the next twenty-two years, the creature—who I came to call The Watcher—became the closest friend I had left in the world. Every few days I brought food: apples, trout, canned chili, water. It taught me the sounds of the forest through its own language of hums, huffs, and gestures. It listened as I talked about Sarah, about the pain of loss, about the hollow years that followed her death. It listened the way no human ever had.

In December 1992, I brought a cassette player and played Johnny Cash. The Watcher sat six feet away, completely still, absorbing every note. When the music ended, it hummed a haunting imitation of the melody—its voice deep and echoing like wind through canyon stone. I cried harder than I had since Sarah died. The Watcher made no judgment. It simply stayed beside me until the sobs stopped.

When winter hit full force, I worried constantly about its survival—until I realized it was watching over me just as much as I watched over it.

In April 1993 it saved two lost hikers—David Chen and Marissa Lopez—by finding them near death and leading me to them. I took the official credit, but I knew the truth: without The Watcher, they would have died.

Trust grew slowly, layer by layer. By 1997 it allowed me close enough to touch the bark of an 800-year-old cedar beside its massive hand. It hummed a vibration that passed through the tree and into my bones. I swear I felt the tree answer. Whether that was real or imagined, I still don’t know.

Then, in 2001, I learned The Watcher had a family.

Young ones—small, wide-eyed, fearful but curious—living in a cave hidden behind a waterfall. When I knelt before them to appear smaller, one touched my boot, then patted my arm. I looked at The Watcher and understood everything: the clearing, the secrecy, the desperate warnings, the quiet sorrow. The Watcher wasn’t a monster. It was a parent trying to protect its children from a world that would destroy them out of fear.

By 2005, the young ones were almost five feet tall, playful and intelligent. I taught them to hull strawberries. They laughed—actual joy, expressed through high-pitched clicking hums. And The Watcher watched us play with a pride I recognized instantly: the look of a parent seeing their children grow strong.

But danger was always near. Hunters came too close in 1999. Helicopters flew over in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks. Fires swept the Cascades in 2006. The Watcher barely escaped with its family to the waterfall cave. When I found them alive afterward, I collapsed with relief.

By 2007, my health began to fail. Heart attacks. High blood pressure. Fading strength. I told The Watcher I feared what would happen when I could no longer come. It led me closer to the shimmer—closer than ever allowed—and there I saw the truth:

The missing hikers were not eaten.

They were transported.

To somewhere else.
Somewhere wrong.
Somewhere they couldn’t return from.

The Watcher mourned them as much as I did.

I retired in 2012 but continued my visits, though each hike took longer. By 2014, I knew I could not survive many more trips. My final hike to the clearing took four hours. The Watcher and its two now-grown offspring greeted me with unmistakable concern.

“I can’t keep coming,” I whispered, heart aching in more ways than one.

The Watcher knelt before me. I placed my hands on its face and felt coarse fur beneath my palms.

“You changed my life,” I told it. “After Sarah died, I thought I would never feel connection again. But you gave me purpose. You gave me family.”

It touched my hands gently, and then, in a voice rough but deliberate, it tried to speak:

“Guh…bye.”

Goodbye.

It was the first—and last—time it attempted human speech.

I broke.

When I left the clearing for the final time, I turned back again and again. The Watcher remained at the edge, a massive silhouette against fading light, watching me disappear from its world forever.

One week later, a hiker named Rachel Summers went missing. I knew immediately where she had gone—and that no search team would ever find her. The guilt crushed me for years. Though The Watcher wasn’t responsible, though the shimmer itself was the true danger, I had helped protect the secret, and in doing so, I felt responsible for every life it claimed.

In 2017, doctors diagnosed me with congestive heart failure. Two years left, they said. Maybe less. That’s when I decided to write everything down. Not to expose The Watcher—not to endanger it or its family—but to warn the world:

If you hike the Cascades—
and you find a clearing that feels wrong, with scattered belongings and a shimmer in the air—
turn around.
Do not investigate.
Do not step closer.
The shimmer is not for us.

And The Watcher can no longer guide you away.

Now I am eighty-one years old. My heart is failing. My body is fading. But my mind is sharp, and my memories burn brighter than ever—those decades of impossible friendship, quiet understanding, and shared grief in the shadow of ancient Douglas firs.

I write this with shaking hands as I stare at the forest outside my window one last time. I hope that when I die, I’ll see Sarah again. And I hope—wherever The Watcher is—that it knows I kept my promise for as long as I lived.

If this is my last message to the world, let it be this:

The forest holds mysteries older than humanity.
Some are wonders.
Some are wounds.
Some are doors that were never meant to open.

And somewhere in the Cascades…
The Watcher still guards one of them.

The years after I left the forest were the loneliest of my life. Not because I had no one—Packwood had friendly faces, familiar routines, people who waved from their porches and asked about my health—but because none of them knew the truth I carried, a truth too heavy and too strange to belong anywhere except the wilderness that had shaped it. I would sit on my small porch in the evenings, staring toward the dark silhouette of the Cascade Range. Sometimes, when the wind changed direction, I swore I could smell the forest again: sap, moss, river stone, and the faint musk that had once clung to the Watcher’s fur when it sat only a few feet from me. Those memories lived inside my mind like animals pacing in a cage. They refused to be still.

There were nights I woke suddenly, heart racing, convinced I’d heard the low, melodic hum of the Watcher echoing through my house. For a few seconds, I would believe it was standing just outside my window, waiting for me to step into the tree line and follow it again. But the only thing waiting outside was moonlight and an empty yard. The dreams always left me shaken, not because they frightened me, but because they reminded me of something I had never admitted to anyone, not even myself: that leaving the Watcher felt like abandoning a family member. It was a strange thing to love a creature the world insists doesn’t exist. Stranger still to grieve it.

In 2018, months after I began writing my account, something happened that forced me to revisit the truth more violently than any dream had. A local journalist named Henry Caldwell showed up on my doorstep one morning, holding a notebook and a camera slung around his neck. He was young—mid-twenties, maybe—with the kind of restless, hungry eyes that belong to people who believe every mystery can be solved if they just dig hard enough. He introduced himself politely, though his voice carried the unmistakable excitement of someone on the verge of uncovering something important.

He said he was doing a story on missing hikers in Washington State, particularly the cluster of disappearances northeast of Mount Rainier. My stomach tightened immediately. That region had always been a hotspot for vanishings. Search and rescue teams considered it notoriously treacherous, but I knew the truth: people disappeared because they wandered too close to the clearing. They stepped into that impossible shimmer. And once they crossed through, they didn’t return.

Caldwell peppered me with questions, each one feeling like a scalpel pressing into old scars. Why were the disappearances concentrated in that specific region? Why did they seem to follow no pattern? Why were there no remains, no evidence of animal attack, no sign of foul play? And why had so many rangers—including me—filed vague, inconclusive reports over three decades?

I answered cautiously, my voice steady but my pulse unsteady. I told him the truth the department accepted: the terrain was unforgiving, weather unpredictable, and hikers often underestimated the forest. But Caldwell wasn’t satisfied. He flipped through his notebook and pushed it toward me. “I’ve interviewed six rangers who worked in your district,” he said. “They all said you knew the area better than anyone. They also said you avoided one particular section of the forest for more than twenty years. Why is that?”

My breath caught. When had I slipped up? When had my careful route reports, my excuses about unstable ground and unsafe old-growth zones, revealed themselves?

I forced a calm expression. “Some areas aren’t safe for hikers,” I said. “Steep drop-offs. Unstable soil.”

He leaned forward. “But safe enough for you?”

It was unsettling how close he had come to the truth without ever seeing the clearing. I studied him, weighing the consequences of telling him something—anything. The Watcher was likely still alive, still guarding its world and its secret. The least I could do was protect it from a curious young man with too much ambition and too little understanding of what lay in those woods.

So I lied.

“Age changes a man,” I said softly. “Some places I used to walk without hesitation started feeling dangerous. That’s all.”

He didn’t look convinced. But he also didn’t push harder. He thanked me politely, shook my hand, and walked back to his car. I watched him drive down the gravel road, dust rising behind him like a warning. As soon as he was gone, I felt a cold certainty settle in my chest: he would go looking for the clearing.

Two weeks later, I saw his name on the news.

MISSING HIKER: HENRY CALDWELL, 26, LAST SEEN IN THE CASCADE RANGE. SEARCH AND RESCUE TEAMS DEPLOYED.

The words slammed into me with the force of a falling tree. My hands trembled violently as I held the newspaper, the print blurring behind my tears. Grief surged through me—not only for the young man whose life had ended before it truly began, but for the way his disappearance mirrored all the others. I had tried to protect him by refusing to speak. But my silence had doomed him. He had gone looking for answers I could have warned him away from—if only I hadn’t been so afraid.

For weeks I followed the news obsessively. Teams scoured the forest with dogs, drones, and helicopters. Volunteers poured in from nearby towns. His parents appeared on television pleading for help, their faces hollow with desperation. Every night I sat in my small living room, heart aching, whispering the same prayer: Please let him have turned back. Please let him be lost, not gone.

But I knew.

I had known the moment I saw the headline.

One afternoon, three weeks into the search, I drove out to a trailhead far closer to the clearing than I had been in years. I couldn’t hike—not with my failing heart—but sitting in my truck, I could see the ridge line I had once walked so effortlessly. The forest loomed there, ancient and unchanging, a silent cathedral of secrets. I imagined Henry stepping through the shimmer—confused, frightened, disappearing into a world I could barely comprehend.

That night, I dreamed of the Watcher for the first time in years. In the dream, it stood at the edge of the clearing, its amber eyes sorrowful, its great shoulders bowed under a weight I recognized instantly.

It was grieving too.

When I woke, I understood something with painful clarity: the Watcher had spent decades trying to prevent people from crossing that threshold. It had done more to save lives than any ranger ever had. And now, without me, without anyone who understood its warnings, it was alone again—facing a danger as old as the forest itself.

Months passed. Then, one evening in mid-autumn, as the fog crept low over the ground and the scent of pine resin drifted through my window, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a decade.

A presence.

Not physical—more like a memory brushing against the edge of consciousness. I stepped outside, bracing myself against the railing, my heart fluttering unpredictably. The forest was dark, the wind carrying faint echoes. And for just a moment—half a second—I swore I heard a low hum drifting over the treetops.

The Watcher.

Calling out.
Or maybe saying goodbye.

It took all the strength I had not to break down then and there. The years had taken my health, my mobility, my certainty—but they had not taken my bond with that impossible creature. Even distance couldn’t sever whatever thread connected us.

After that night, I began writing with renewed urgency. My account grew longer, more detailed, more painful. Not because I wanted fame or attention—God knows I’d avoid both—but because I knew my time was short. If I died before leaving some form of warning behind, others would meet the same fate as Henry. And I had carried that guilt long enough.

But something unexpected happened in the process of writing.

As my story deepened, as memory poured onto the page, I realized I had never fully understood the Watcher—not the depth of its empathy, not the burden of its purpose, not the origin of its loneliness.

And then, piece by piece, the truth began to form.

The Watcher was not merely protecting humanity from the shimmer.

It was protecting the shimmer from humanity.

Because whatever lay beyond that warped air, whatever strange world had swallowed hundreds of unsuspecting hikers—it might not want to be discovered. It might not want to be disturbed. The Watcher wasn’t just guarding a doorway.

It was guarding the boundary between worlds.

And boundaries, once broken, never heal the same way again.

In 2019, one year after I began writing, a violent storm swept through the Cascades—one of the strongest in decades. Lightning struck in rapid succession, illuminating the sky in relentless white flashes. I sat awake through the night, uneasy in a way I couldn’t explain. The house creaked under the wind’s force, windows rattling as if something pressed against them from the outside.

Just after midnight, the lights flickered and went out completely. The house plunged into darkness. I reached for a lantern, but before I could light it, a soft sound drifted through the open window.

A hum.
Low.
Melancholic.
Familiar.

I froze. The air in the room thickened, charged like the moment before a lightning strike. For a heartbeat, two, three, I could not move. My breath caught in my throat.

Then I whispered the name I had not spoken aloud in years.

“…Watcher?”

Silence.

Then—

A distant crack, like a heavy tree limb breaking under immense weight.

Then nothing.

I stood at the window long after the storm ended, staring into the pitch-black silhouette of the Cascades. Part of me wanted to believe the sound had been nothing more than wind or thunder. But I knew better.

Something had changed in the forest that night.

Something had ended.
Or something had awakened.

The next morning, news broke that another hiker had gone missing during the storm. His last known GPS ping placed him dangerously close to the region of the clearing. Search teams combed the area for days with no success. The pattern repeated itself exactly as it had for decades.

But this time, something was different.

The disappearances continued—but the spacing between them grew irregular. Some months passed without incident. Then two vanishings happened within ten days. It felt chaotic, unpredictable, as if the Watcher’s constant, steadying presence was gone.

The realization struck me like a blow:
The Watcher might have died during the storm.

Age, injury, the wrath of nature—any of these could have taken it. Or perhaps, in its final act of guardianship, it had stepped too close to the shimmer itself.

The thought crushed me in a way nothing had since Sarah’s death.

The forest had lost its sentinel.
The doorway had lost its protector.

And humanity had lost the one creature willing to stand between us and whatever existed on the other side of that threshold.

In early 2020, just as winter loosened its grip on the valley, I made a decision that defied logic, health, and all the warnings my body had given me. I would return to the clearing. One last time. Not to seek the Watcher—whether it still lived or not—but to honor it. To see the place where our unlikely friendship had blossomed into something sacred.

My doctor told me I shouldn’t walk more than a mile. The clearing was nearly six miles from any point I could safely reach by vehicle. But grief, purpose, and love for that creature wove themselves into a stubborn determination stronger than any medical warning.

I parked at an old service road and began the slow ascent. My heart pounded erratically. My legs ached. The walking stick trembled in my grip. Yet I kept moving, drawn forward by something deeper than memory. The forest greeted me like an old friend—changed, yet familiar. The trees were taller, older. Moss blanketed everything in thick green velvet. The air felt heavier, almost watchful.

Halfway up the ridge, I stopped to rest, leaning heavily against a fallen log. That’s when I noticed something strange: tracks. Huge footprints, decades older than the soft impressions they once left in snow and mud, now fossilized almost into the earth. The Watcher had walked this path many, many times. And now I was following it one last time.

When I reached the clearing, the sun was beginning to set. The light filtered through the trees in narrow golden shafts, illuminating the earth in a haunting glow. The belongings were still there—aged, weather-worn, covered in moss and pine needles—but recognizable. Frozen in time.

But the shimmer—

It was gone.

The air where it once rippled now lay still, ordinary, empty.

For the first time in decades, the clearing felt like just a clearing.

A wave of emotion crashed over me. Knees trembling, I sank to the ground, pressing my palm into the soil where the doorway once pulsed with otherworldly energy.

Had the shimmer died?
Had the Watcher destroyed it?
Had the storm itself severed whatever connection bound our world to the other?

Or—
Had something crossed over?

As I sat there shaking, breath uneven, the forest shifted behind me—soft, almost imperceptible, like a massive body easing carefully through brush to avoid startling me. My heart lurched into my throat. I turned my head slowly, afraid of what I might see, or not see.

A shape stood at the edge of the tree line.
Tall.
Motionless.
Watching.

Amber eyes glowed faintly in the dimming light.

Not one pair.

Three.

The children—grown. Alive. Waiting.

And behind them—

A fourth shape.

Smaller.
Tentative.
New.

A child.

A generation I never knew existed.

The Watcher’s legacy had endured.

A sound rose in the clearing then—a low, harmonic hum—soft, familiar, echoing through every memory that had ever mattered. My eyes filled with tears. My old heart pounded so hard I thought it might give out right there on the forest floor.

They had come to say goodbye.

Or perhaps—
to show me that the forest still had guardians.

I lifted a trembling hand.

The nearest silhouette lifted its hand in return.

We stayed like that—man and creature, separated by species but bound by years of shared trust—until the last light faded and twilight swallowed the clearing.

Then, one by one, they stepped back into the forest and vanished without a sound.

I remained there long after they were gone, letting the night settle around me like an old blanket. For the first time in many years, I felt peace instead of regret. Whatever the shimmer had been, whatever dangers it once posed—it was gone. Or dormant. Or sealed. And the Watcher’s family lived on, still watching the woods, still guarding the secrets the world was not meant to unravel.

Now, as I finish writing these pages, I know my time is almost over. My heartbeat is an unreliable companion. My breath grows shorter every week. But my mind is clear, and my purpose is fulfilled.

I kept the Watcher’s secret while I lived.

And now, with my death close at hand,
I leave the truth behind—not to expose,
not to endanger,
but to remind the world of a lesson it constantly forgets:

Not all monsters are dangerous.
Not all dangers are monstrous.
And some boundaries exist not to trap us,
but to protect us from what lies beyond.

If anyone ever finds this story…
trust what I tell you now:

The forest remembers
everything.

And somewhere in the Cascades,
so do the Watchers.

In the months following my final visit to the clearing, I found myself drifting between this world and memory, as though a part of me had never walked back down the ridge that day. My body stayed in Packwood—frail, weakening, sitting quietly in an old wooden chair by the window—but my mind wandered constantly to the forest. The rustle of branches outside my house sounded like footsteps. The settling of the roof at night reminded me of the Watcher shifting its massive weight beside me. Sometimes, when I drifted near sleep, I imagined the soft vibration of its chest as it hummed—a sound so gentle for a creature so immense that it seemed to come from the earth itself.

The doctors told me my heart was failing faster than expected. I told them I was fine. What I didn’t tell them was that I no longer feared dying. In some strange way, I felt as though the forest had already accepted my passing, had already begun weaving me into its story as quietly and naturally as a fallen leaf merging back into the soil.

But about six months after my final hike, something happened that pulled me abruptly back into the world of the living—something that made my blood run cold with recognition.

A woman from the sheriff’s office came knocking on my door one morning. Her name was Deputy Marlene Curtis, mid-50s, sharp-eyed, with a seriousness about her that suggested she had very little patience for nonsense. She held a manila folder tucked under one arm.

“Mr. Garrett,” she said, “we’d like to ask you a few questions.”

My heart tripped. Questions about what? Henry Caldwell? The missing hikers? The restricted areas I’d spent decades trying to steer people away from? I stepped aside and let her in, though every instinct in my body told me she hadn’t just stopped by for casual conversation.

She sat at my kitchen table, adjusted her glasses, and opened the folder. The first photograph she slid toward me nearly stopped my breath.

A footprint.

Large. Deep. Humanoid. Fourteen, maybe fifteen inches long. Too wide to be a bear, too long to be a man. Edges crisp, not distorted. Fresh.

It was the kind of footprint I had followed through the Cascade woods more times than I could count—fresh enough that the creature had been standing there hours, perhaps minutes before the photo was taken.

“We found this yesterday,” Curtis said. “Near the boundary of the old service road you used to patrol.”

I swallowed hard. The Watcher’s children, perhaps. Or their children. The next generation.

More guardians.

“I’ve never seen a track quite like this,” she continued carefully. “Some of the guys think it’s a hoax. Others think it’s… well… something else.” She waited for me to respond.

I kept my expression neutral. “Lots of strange prints in those woods,” I said. “Mud shifts. Rocks distort. Hard to know what anything is with certainty.”

She studied me with an intensity that reminded me of Caldwell.

“Maybe,” she said. “But this wasn’t the only thing we found.”

She placed the second photograph on the table.

My hands began to tremble.

It was a tree—an old Douglas fir—its bark deeply scarred with long, vertical gouges. Not random. Not claw marks. Symbols. Primitive but deliberate. I recognized them immediately.

The Watcher had carved those symbols years ago to warn me away from unstable ground in winter. They were a message—a language of sorts that it had tried to teach me.

Deputy Curtis leaned forward. “You worked those woods for decades,” she said. “You know them better than anyone. So tell me…”

She tapped the photo with a perfectly trimmed fingernail.

“What kind of animal does this?”

My throat tightened. I didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. But I knew.

The Watcher’s family was still alive. They were marking territory. Perhaps warning humans away. Perhaps warning something else away.

Curtis sighed, closed the folder, and stood. “If you think of anything,” she said, “please give us a call.”

But then she paused at the doorway, hesitation flickering across her face.

“This isn’t an official question,” she added quietly. “Just something I’ve wondered for a long time.”

She turned back to face me.

“You ever see anything out there, Mr. Garrett? Anything you couldn’t explain?”

I looked at her for a long moment. The truth pressed against my chest like a weight. I could have told her everything—about the Watcher, the shimmer, the doorway between worlds. But her question wasn’t born from hope or excitement. It was born from fear. And fear makes people dangerous.

So I shook my head.

“No,” I said softly. “Nothing I couldn’t explain.”

Curtis nodded, but I could tell she didn’t believe me. Still, she said nothing more. She walked to her patrol car and drove away.

The moment she disappeared down the road, I sat heavily in my chair, breathing hard. They were close—too close. If the Watchers felt threatened, they might retreat deeper into the mountains. Or worse, defend themselves. Humans rarely understood the difference between defense and aggression when confronted with something they didn’t believe existed.

For the first time in years, panic clawed at my chest.

The forest was shifting.

Something had started to awaken.

Or unravel.

That night I dreamed again—not of the Watcher, but of the shimmer. In the dream, the clearing pulsed with light, as if the air itself had become liquid. Something moved behind the shimmer—vast, slow, deliberate. The trees bent away from it as though trying to avoid being touched. The forest trembled. And then I heard a voice—not spoken, not human—deep, resonant, layered with echoes.

It is not closed.

I woke drenched in sweat, gasping for breath. My heart hammered irregularly. I pressed a hand to my chest, trying to steady the arrhythmic pulses.

Was it just a dream?

Or had the shimmer resurfaced?

By morning, I had made a decision that felt both reckless and inevitable. I would go back one last time—not to the clearing, but to the boundary of the service road where Curtis had found that footprint.

I didn’t intend to walk far. I simply needed to know if the forest felt… different. If something in it had changed. I told myself I would only stay a few minutes.

I lied.

The moment I stepped out of my truck and inhaled the cold mountain air, something ancient stirred inside me. A familiarity. A longing. The sense that I was returning not to a place but to a part of myself I had left behind.

The trail was overgrown. Branches hung low. Fallen logs blocked parts of the path. But the forest around me was alive in a way I hadn’t felt since the Watcher first led me to the clearing decades ago. The air hummed faintly—not audibly, but through the bones, like the echo of a distant engine or the memory of a sound rather than the sound itself.

Then I saw it.

A new footprint in the mud.

Fresh.
Large.
Deep.

But this one was different—wider, heavier, with a slight drag behind the heel. An adult Watcher. Not one of the children.

My breath caught.

The Watcher—my Watcher—was alive.

I followed the prints, pulse racing, moving faster than my body should have allowed. My chest burned. My vision blurred at the edges. But I kept going.

The forest grew quieter. Not silent—alive in its stillness. As though it held its breath.

And then—

Ahead of me, partially hidden by a veil of fog, stood a massive silhouette.

Eight feet tall.
Broad shoulders.
Amber eyes glowing faintly in the shifting light.

The Watcher.

Its fur had greyed along the shoulders and limbs. Its movements were slower than I remembered. Age had come for it just as surely as it had come for me.

But it was alive.

I stumbled forward, tears flooding my vision. My voice broke when I tried to speak.

“…You’re still here.”

The Watcher made a soft, low vibration that resonated through the trees. Not the warning hum. Not the grieving hum.

A greeting.

For a moment, the world became impossibly small—just the two of us standing in a forest that seemed to fade away around the edges. My chest ached with something too deep to name.

The Watcher stepped closer. Slowly. Carefully. As though it knew how fragile I had become.

Then it reached out one massive hand.

Not to guide me.
Not to warn me.

But to steady me.

My legs nearly gave out. I placed my trembling hand against its palm, feeling the roughness of its fur, the warmth of its skin beneath. Age had thinned the fur. Bones pressed closer to the surface. It was old. Far older than I had realized. Perhaps older than any human record of these forests.

We stood like that for a long time—an old man and an ancient creature, both nearing the end of their lives, both trying to hold on to something neither could name.

Finally, the Watcher withdrew its hand and turned its head toward the deeper forest. Then it made a sound I had never heard before—soft, melodic, almost mournful.

A farewell.

And then—
for the first time in our entire relationship—
it turned its back to me.

The meaning was unmistakable.

It was leaving.
Not just me.
Not just the clearing.
It was leaving this world.

Maybe to die.
Maybe to follow its children to safer lands.
Maybe to step through the shimmer itself, if it had ever truly closed.

I watched as it walked into the fog.
Slow.
Old.
Majestic.

I tried to call out—to say its name, if it had one—but no sound came. My throat closed. My chest tightened. Tears blurred everything into streaks of silver and green.

And then—
it was gone.

Not vanished.
Not disappeared.
Just… gone.
Walking into a part of the forest I could no longer reach.

That was the last time I ever saw the Watcher.

I stood there for a long time, leaning heavily on my walking stick, my breath thin and trembling. I felt something inside me crack—not pain, but completion. The closing of a circle. The final page of a story written across decades.

When I finally turned back toward my truck, the forest behind me hummed softly—like a great heart settling into sleep.

I understood then:

The Watcher had not been the guardian of the clearing.

It had been the guardian of me.

And now that both of us were nearing our ends, it had given me the only gift it could:

A proper goodbye.