THE THING THAT CLIMBS WHEN THE WORLD SLEEPS
The night the forest changed my understanding of what belongs on this planet began with nothing more dramatic than fog moving like slow breath between the ancient trunks of the Northern California sequoias. It was past midnight, the kind of hour where sound loses its edges and darkness feels heavier, older, like something alive. My name is Sergeant Briggs Marlo, eleven years reconnaissance, and I thought I’d seen every strange thing that the world’s shadows could hold, from insurgents slipping through ravines like ghosts to animals appearing on thermals as sudden bursts of heat against cold desert stone. But nothing prepared me for the way the fog that night seemed to wait rather than drift, as if it were listening, as if it knew exactly who had entered its territory. Military reconnaissance doctrine teaches that forests are cover, concealment, resource, and obstacle all at once, but those doctrines collapse in the presence of trees old enough to predate recorded human history and tall enough to erase your confidence in physics. The redwoods didn’t feel like a landscape—they felt like a presence. And inside that presence, my four-man recon team and I were nothing more than insects crawling between the roots of giants.
We had been inserted into the training area three days earlier for a five-day surveillance mission that was supposed to be forgettable: establish an observation post, gather intel on simulated enemy activity, maintain discipline, extract without being seen. I’d run this exact operation so many times in mountain and forest terrain that it lived in my bones. With me was Specialist Tanner Beaumont, my spotter, eyes like a hawk and nerves like braided steel; Corporal Jonas Valori, our tracker, a Montana-born hunter who could tell you how old a print was by the way a pine needle bent; and Private First Class Silus Renford, comms specialist, youngest of us, brilliant with electronics and still naïve enough to think the world had limits. We made camp between two enormous redwoods whose bases were so wide that even four soldiers with their arms outstretched couldn’t encircle one. The forest smelled of cold sap and damp soil and the kind of silence that isn’t absence of sound, but rather a deliberate withholding of it. The fog had rolled in thick by the time we settled into our watch rotation, and even with my thermal optics, visibility was little more than a shifting mosaic of heat and shadow.
At 23:47 hours, what began as a routine surveillance sweep turned into the kind of moment your brain rejects before it understands, the kind that rewires your instincts before it rewrites your beliefs. Beaumont stiffened, barely perceptible but unmistakable to me after years of working together. His fingers hovered over his rifle before returning to the thermal scope, a gesture so subtle most civilians wouldn’t have seen it, but to me it meant one thing: whatever he saw wasn’t normal. Movement northwest sector seventy meters he whispered, the kind of whisper soldiers learn—soundless, breath-only, meant for the person beside you and no one else. I brought my own optics up and scanned toward the base of what we’d been calling the cathedral tree, a monstrous sequoia around two hundred feet tall. Fog distorted everything, turning branches into ghosts and heat signatures into flickers of white on gray, but then I saw it—a pale form moving upward along the trunk. Not climbing. Flowing.
There is a way humans climb: we reach, pull, brace, shift. There is a way animals climb: claws dig, muscles coil, momentum bursts. This wasn’t either. This thing’s ascent was continuous, fluid, eerie in its lack of effort. Its limbs extended at angles that seemed anatomically wrong, like a sketch drawn by someone who had seen a person once and remembered only the rough idea. Thermal optics should have lit a living creature bright against the wood, but this thing was just barely warmer than the bark, a faint ghostly outline instead of a body. That alone made no sense. No mammal has a thermal signature that faint. No reptile should be climbing a vertical sequoia at night in forty-degree fog. The fog thinned just enough for me to see its form—elongated limbs, narrow torso, a bulbous head pressed disturbingly flat against the bark—and for a moment I thought it was hugging the trunk like a child clinging to a parent. Then it turned its head downward, and even eighty feet above us, even through night vision distortions and fog, I felt the unmistakable electric snap of being seen. Not noticed. Seen.
Beaumont whispered what we were all thinking but didn’t want to admit: “Sarge… it’s looking at us.”
The thing froze, perfectly still, as if it were evaluating us not as threats or prey but as anomalies breaking the rules of a world that belonged to it. Valori stirred awake behind us, instinct pulling him from sleep faster than his conscious mind could follow. What the hell is that? he whispered, but there was no hostility in his voice—only the quiet horror of a hunter realizing something in the forest hunts better than he does. For nearly a full minute, none of us moved, not even to breathe properly. Fog swirled, branches creaked somewhere in the distance, and the pale figure remained suspended against the trunk like a parasite fused with ancient bark.
Then it changed position.
And when it did, every assumption I had carried about movement, weight, physics, sound, biology—everything—collapsed.
It didn’t climb.
It didn’t drop.
It slid, fast, controlled, impossible, descending forty feet in two seconds without accelerating, without sound, without impact.
And at twenty feet above the ground, it simply stopped.
Pressed flat.
Watching.
Waiting.
It held there against the trunk, twenty feet up, limbs splayed like some huge pale insect trying to mimic a human stretched into the wrong proportions, and in the ghostly green wash of my night vision I could finally see enough detail to make my skin crawl. The limbs were long—too long—the arms seeming to reach both up and out, fingers splayed in a way that suggested more joints than anything on a human skeleton should have. The torso was narrow, almost weightless-looking, yet whatever muscles lay beneath that smooth, uniform skin supported it effortlessly on the sheer vertical face of a giant sequoia. And the head—God, the head—was smooth and hairless and shaped just wrong enough to make my brain try to correct it in real time, as if it were looking at a distorted reflection and insisting the mirror was broken, not the image. Eyes sat slightly farther apart than they should have, angled just a little off horizontal, and where a nose ought to be there was nothing more than a slight rise, a hint rather than a feature. The mouth was a thin line, too wide, running almost ear to ear if it had ears at all under that pallid skin. And in that frozen moment, it tilted its head one way, then the other, like a bird analyzing something shiny, and I understood with total, stomach-deep certainty that it wasn’t just looking toward us—it was selecting which of us to focus on first.
Valori was trembling beside me. I could feel it through the air even before I shifted my weight and heard the slightest shiver in his gear. “Sarge,” he whispered, voice thinning into something dangerously close to panic, “that’s not—” He didn’t finish because words failed him. They were failing me, too. My training wanted labels: man, animal, drone, unknown hostile. None fit. My instincts wanted categories: fight, flight, freeze. The soldier in me whispered: hold. Observe. Document. Survive.
We held.
The thing remained immobile for so long that the forest began to feel like a photograph: us half-crouched behind a lesser trunk, the pale thing pinned to the massive tree, fog threads hanging between us like spider silk. No breeze. No insect noise. No distant owl. Just the faint hiss of our regulated breathing and the soft hum of my own blood in my ears. Somewhere behind us, back at the hide, Renford breathed into his headset, “Status?” and his voice sounded like a scream tearing through a church.
“Contact stationary,” I whispered into the mic, eyes never leaving the pale form. “Unknown entity. Distance two-five meters lateral, two-zero vertical. Observing us. Do not move from position. Maintain overwatch.”
On the thermal scope slung at my chest, the thing showed as a ghostly almost-color, a faint warm smear just barely above ambient. I flipped my optic down and back up, thermal to night vision, night vision to unaided eye. Each mode confirmed the others: this wasn’t fog tricking my sight or the electronic grain lying to me. It was there. It was real. It was watching.
Then it did something I still dream about.
It didn’t climb down or drop. It pushed away from the trunk.
For a fraction of a second that felt like a lifetime, it hung in open air, limbs bent in, body compact, like a spider retracting into itself. And then, instead of falling, it almost swam back to the bark, reconnecting as if some invisible tether had snapped it straight onto the surface again. It covered three feet horizontally without dropping more than a foot, sheer vertical wall under its feet and hands the entire time. There was no lash of a line, no sound of a hook, no scuffle of claws. Just that uncanny, frictionless repositioning. I saw Valori’s jaw tighten; he bit back the sound that almost came out of him. My own stomach flipped. Every rule of motion I knew had just been turned inside out in front of me.
“Marlo,” Beaumont’s whisper came over comms, tight and quiet from the hide, “thermal shows horizontal movement. Same low signature. Say again, that thing is barely warmer than the tree. That’s not possible for something that size.”
“Copy,” I answered. “Maintain visual if able. We’re repositioning to avoid direct approach. Break contact slowly.”
“Are we leaving?” Valori breathed beside me, not arguing, just needing to know. His knuckles were white on his rifle.
“Not yet,” I said, though my body was screaming at me to get as far from that trunk as possible. “We don’t run blind from what we don’t understand. We pull back, we watch, we live. Slow step.”
We took a synchronized backward step, boots pressing even weight into the soft carpet of needles to make almost no sound. The thing’s head twitched. Its eyes tracked. It didn’t follow—not yet. It remained fused to the bark in that splayed cruciform posture, like some albino gargoyle half-grown out of the tree itself. Another backstep, then a third. Thirty feet became thirty-five. Thirty-five became forty. At that distance, fog began to swallow detail, turning the thing from a monster into a shape again, but I could still see those eyes: two darker pits in a paler oval, never wavering from us.
Then it made a sound.
I’ve heard the screams of wounded men. I’ve heard vehicles detonate on IEDs, heard bones break and lungs collapse and wild animals call to each other across frozen valleys. Nothing in those years of recorded noise prepared me for the quiet wrongness of that sound. It started as a dry click, like hard plastic tapping against hard plastic, rapid and rhythmically patterned. Then air joined it, a wheeze pushed through a throat shaped for something other than speech—a harsh in-and-out accompaniment that turned the clicking into a phrase. There was no volume to it, no roar, nothing that would have frightened you in a movie. It was the pattern that scared me, the way it came in deliberate bursts, as if whatever clung to that bark was sending information into the night.
My mind, desperate for something rational, whispered: insect. Frog. Bird. Any of those could click. Any of those could wheeze. But insects don’t cling to trees eight stories high and watch human patrols like curious gods. Frogs don’t move like reversed water up a redwood’s skin. Birds don’t leave hand-shaped impressions in soil.
“Negative engagement,” I said into the radio, more to myself than my team. “Repeat, negative engagement. We are not firing unless it closes within ten meters. Last resort only. Understood?”
There was a relay of quiet affirmations in my ear. Even scared, they were soldiers.
At some invisible signal only it understood, the creature—or whatever it was—stopped clicking. It paused, head angled sharply like it was listening for an answer we hadn’t given. Then, without any sense of buildup, it began to ascend again, smoothly, silently, becoming a pale smear against dark bark, then a blur, then nothing as fog reclaimed it. One moment it was in sight. The next, the space where it had been was just tree.
We stayed put for a full five minutes, counting breaths instead of seconds. My nerves wanted to believe it had melted into the trunk, but my training knew better. It had finished what it came to do: it had seen us, measured us, cataloged us. And now it was somewhere else, doing who knew what, with who knew how many others like it.
Back at the hide, under the low canvas and between our shielding trunks, the world felt smaller but not safer. We debriefed quietly, our voices flat as we described what we’d seen. Beaumont laid out what his thermal imager recorded: near-background heat signature, bipedal outline, then quadrupedal, vertical movement inconsistent with human climbers. Valori described the way its weight shifted, how its limbs compressed and extended with an alien sort of economy. Renford, pale and wide-eyed, repeated what he’d heard from our channel: our breath, our words, that clicking. I wrote it all down in my little green tactical notebook, each detail pinned onto paper with the hope that if we documented enough, someone smarter than us might one day have answers.
The fog thickened into early morning, then thinned as weak daylight filtered in. Colors returned to the world, turning what had been black-and-green phantoms into the deep reds and browns of old bark, the cold greens of moss and ferns, the silver of lingering mist twisting between trunks. At 0900, I made the call I knew I had to make.
“We’re going back to that tree,” I said.
Renford looked at me like I’d suggested we walk toward gunfire with our eyes closed. “With respect, Sarge, why? We saw it. We know it’s real. Isn’t that enough?”
“No,” I said. “Not for a report. Not for a chain of command that wasn’t there. They’ll need something the forest can’t argue with. Physical evidence. Tracks. Marks. Anything that says this isn’t four tired guys spooking themselves in the fog.”
Valori gave a short nod. “We find sign, we document, we leave,” he said. “We’re not hunting it. We’re proving it’s not in our heads.”
“Exactly,” I agreed. “We treat it like any unknown. We track only as long as we can control the situation. The second we can’t, we pull out.”
The walk to the cathedral tree in daylight was like a crime scene revisit, the forest unchanged and yet completely different now that we’d seen what it could host. The same columns of red bark towered upward. The same carpets of needles muffled our steps. But under that, I felt a new layer—something like attention, something like the air holding its breath to see if we’d learned anything. There were no fresh sounds of chainsaws, no other units moving through the training area, no overhead aircraft. We were alone. At least, officially.
Standing at the base of that giant sequoia, staring up into its heights, I could almost convince myself that the night had been an elaborate trick of eyes and electronics. Almost.
“Here,” Valori said, voice dropping without him realizing it. He stood six feet back from the trunk, hand outstretched toward the bark.
Up close, you could see it. Where I’d seen those pale “hands” press against the tree, the bark was wrong. Sequoia bark is thick and fibrous, a vertical landscape of ridges and grooves. But running up in a nearly straight line were slightly flattened ovals, each about the size of my splayed hand, maybe a bit longer. They weren’t gouges like claws would make, not scratches from metal. They were compression marks, as if something had pressed down with tremendous steady force and fused the fibers together temporarily. The line vanished into the upper fog, but even at our limit of visible reach, the pattern held.
“Not gear,” Valori muttered. “I’ve seen guys ascend rock and trees with all kinds of equipment. This… this looks like the tree got pinched over and over by something soft but strong. Like it was grabbed and squeezed.”
“Collect samples,” I ordered. My voice sounded strange, too calm. “We document everything.”
He scraped compressed bark into an evidence bag while I snapped photos from multiple angles, my hand in the frame for scale. We worked our way around the trunk, following the faint path of compression. On the far side, roughly ten feet up, we found something new: four sharp gouges, parallel, each about three inches long, carved into fresh wood that hadn’t yet darkened from exposure.
“Four digits,” Beaumont said quietly. “Too far apart for a raccoon, too neat for a bear. Spacing’s wrong for any normal paw.”
“Or it swiped at something,” Renford said, “and these are where it raked the bark.”
The word rake hung in the air, echoing something from old online horror forums I’d once seen late at night when boredom and morbid curiosity met. I pushed that association away. Stories were dangerous here; they twisted what you see into what you expect. I needed facts.
Facts were waiting on the ground.
“Over here,” Beaumont called, and when I came around the tree I saw it clearly: an impression in the carpet of needles and soft soil, roughly circular, about four feet across. At first glance, it might have been someone’s knee-print or a fallen branch’s mark, but the pattern was too deliberate. Five depressions: one central, four around it, not like a foot, not like a hoof—like a hand. A hand the size of a man’s torso pressing straight down with enough force to compact forest floor that had been building for decades.
My own hand looked small as I held it above one of the outer depressions. It would have fit entirely inside.
“Something landed here,” Valori said. “Hard and controlled. Look at the edges—crisp. This wasn’t hours ago. This was maybe… what, six, eight hours at most? The moisture hasn’t rebounded. The needles haven’t lifted back.”
“And then it went that way,” he added, pointing into the forest.
Once he said it, I saw it. The trail wasn’t obvious like a deer path or a human track. It was a series of those radial impressions, spaced irregularly, as if something long-limbed was moving on all fours, each limb landing with that disturbing hand-palm contact. No heel, no toe. Just pressure points in patterns that made my legs feel suddenly weak.
“We’re not following it,” I said, firmly this time, the decision already solidifying in my gut. “We came for proof. We’ve got it. We’re not a hunting party. We’re scouts on a training mission in a domestic zone. We do not track unknown entities deeper into their own territory with limited comms and no support.”
I half-expected someone to argue. None of them did. The forest seemed to lean in, listening for a different decision and sagging back when it didn’t get one.
We collected samples from the footprint, sealed everything, finished our photographs, and returned to the hide with our evidence. The rest of the mission was almost anticlimactic. The opposing “enemy” in the valley never showed. The simulated training targets never mattered. Our eyes were never on the pretend war games again. They were on the trunks, on the fog, on the spaces between branches.
When we called for an early extraction, I worded the contact report carefully: “Unknown large animal, anomalous climbing behavior, thermal irregularities, non-aggressive but curious. Physical evidence collected. Potential wildlife hazard.” I didn’t say monster. I didn’t say humanoid. I didn’t say we all thought, but didn’t dare admit, that we had looked at something the world pretends does not exist.
Back at base, under fluorescent lights and reinforced ceilings, the forest felt far away, almost fictional. But when I laid out the photos, the bark, the scratched samples, the print impressions, and my timeline for the operations officer, the unreality vanished. Those marks were real. Those measurements were real. The tremor in my voice wasn’t.
“You’re telling me you saw something the size of a man crawling up a tree like a lizard,” Captain Hendricks said slowly, flipping through my photographs. “You’re telling me it was barely warmer than its surroundings and that it circled your position later that night like it was playing recon on you. And you’re telling me this with a straight face.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Because that’s what happened.”
He stared at me for a long time, then down at the evidence bags. “And you have four statements to match, each from trained observers.”
“Yes, sir.”
He sighed. “Wildlife services are going to love this.”
He was wrong. Wildlife services showed up. But they didn’t love it.
They minimized it.
They mislabeled it.
They buried it.
And months later, after all the “official” explanations had been written, filed, and signed, after we had learned how to live in a world that pretended what we saw was just a misidentified bear in the fog, I learned something far worse:
Our encounter in those sequoias was not unique. Not even close.
What shook me most wasn’t that other people had seen things like the pale crawler—it was the consistency. Different states. Different forests. Different years. Different witnesses who would never meet each other, never coordinate a story, never agree on a lie. Yet somehow they described the same impossible silhouette: long limbs, pale skin, a face just wrong enough to haunt the subconscious, climbing trees as if physics were optional.
And the more I dug, the more uncomfortable truths began to surface.
The first came from a former park ranger in Oregon who reached out to me through an encrypted email after hearing through unofficial channels that I’d filed a “restricted wildlife incident.” He refused to give me his full name—said it wasn’t safe anymore—but the message he sent was long, detailed, and entirely too familiar.
He described patrolling a fog-heavy ridge line in Olympic National Park when he saw what he thought was a wounded hiker clinging to a tree. He radioed for assistance… until the “hiker” crawled straight up the trunk and vanished into the canopy without making a sound. Search teams found nothing except elongated compression marks in the moss and a patch of disturbed needles below a cedar older than the founding of the United States.
“They told me to write it up as a cougar,” his email concluded.
“But cougars don’t look at you like they understand what you are.”
The second truth came from an Army medic who’d served fifteen years before retiring. He reached out after hearing whispers about “the California incident,” and in a hushed voice over the phone, he recounted treating a soldier from a different unit—some kind of classified operations detachment—who’d been evacuated out of the Shasta wilderness with deep lacerations across his back, four parallel cuts each the length of a man’s forearm.
The medic asked what attacked him.
The soldier answered only once before going silent:
“It wasn’t hunting us.
It was warning us.”
And then there was the third truth, the one that kept me awake for nights afterward:
A missing persons investigator from Humboldt County, a man with nearly thirty years of field experience, told me that dozens—literally dozens—of cases involved sightings of pale shapes near giant tree trunks. People hiking alone. People camping off-trail. People who vanished without leaving a footprint behind.
“They’re not predators,” he said in a low monotone.
“Predators leave meat. Corpses. Bones. Something.”
He swallowed hard, as though afraid the words themselves would summon whatever haunted those forests.
“These things don’t leave remains because they don’t drag people away. They make them disappear.”
I wanted to believe he was exaggerating.
I wanted to believe everyone was exaggerating.
But each testimony aligned too cleanly with what we had seen. All the patterns matched—the clicking vocalizations, the unnatural climbing, the low thermal signature, the tendency to observe without attacking.
That was the strangest thing:
They watched.
They studied.
They learned.
But they rarely attacked.
Which left one question that no one, even among the unofficial whisper networks, could answer:
Why?
Why would a creature capable of such silent precision and predatory grace choose not to eliminate us when it had the perfect chance?
The only conclusion that made sense came from a biologist who reviewed my notes anonymously:
“Predators attack what they see as prey,” she wrote.
“Intelligent species observe what they see as competition.”
That sentence burrowed deep into my thoughts like a parasite. And the more I examined the logic, the more chilling it became.
What if we weren’t prey?
What if we weren’t a threat?
What if, to them…
we were simply another animal in their forest—loud, clumsy, blind to the trees above our heads?
That thought lingered with me into the evenings, through long deployments and quiet nights at home. And it prepared me, though not nearly enough, for what happened next.
Because three months after our California encounter—long after the military had closed our case, long after wildlife services had stamped their seal on the “misidentified bear” report—something arrived in my mailbox with no return address.
A padded brown envelope.
Heavy.
Silent.
Postmarked from Crescent City, California.
Inside was a single object, wrapped in layers of tissue paper.
When I unfolded it, cold sweat broke down my back immediately—
It was a piece of wood.
Bark. Redwood bark, thick and fibrous.
But pressed into the center, burned deep by pressure rather than heat, was a hand-shaped impression with four elongated finger slots and a central palm cavity exactly like the marks we had photographed on the forest floor.
Attached was a note, typed in a courier font on a sheet of paper torn from a government-issued notebook.
No greeting.
No signature.
Just one sentence:
“They’re moving south.”
My heartbeat slammed against my ribs so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
South—
Into what?
Into where?
Into whose territory?
Humans had built cities, highways, railroads. We carved up continents and claimed dominion over landscapes older than our species. But there were places—deep woods, old mountains, fog-heavy forests—where the illusion of control shattered instantly.
I thought of that pale creature pressed against the sequoia bark.
Watching us.
Tilting its head.
Clicking those strange, deliberate patterns.
It hadn’t acted like a predator.
It had acted like a scout.
And suddenly everything clicked into place with horrifying clarity:
It wasn’t alone.
It never was.
When I finally worked up the nerve to call the return address number listed on the postmark’s postal region, the line rang three times before a man answered with a tone so cold and urgent it felt like a blade pressed to my throat.
“Do not contact this number again,” he said immediately.
“Who is this?” I demanded.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Someone sent me evidence. A bark sample. A hand impression. Was it you?”
A long silence followed, broken only by the faint hum of static.
Finally—
“You saw one,” he said quietly. Not a question. A statement.
“You’ve seen them too,” I replied.
Another silence. Then, even quieter:
“I’ve seen entire groups move through forest canopies without breaking a single twig. I’ve heard them communicate across miles of treeline like they were tapping messages into the earth. And I’ve found signs of them in places no animal with bones should be able to reach.”
My throat tightened.
“What are they?” I whispered.
“A better question,” the man said, “is how long we’ve been trespassing in their habitat without realizing it.”
I swallowed hard.
“Tell me who you are.”
“No,” he said, voice low and raw. “But I’ll tell you this: your report didn’t disappear. It was flagged. Categorized. Cross-referenced. The people who study these things don’t work for wildlife services, and they don’t give press briefings.”
“What do they want with me?”
“They want nothing with you,” the man said. “The question is—what do they want with us?”
“Who? The government? The agencies?”
“No,” he whispered.
And I heard something behind his voice—fear so old and deep it had a weight of its own.
“The ones in the trees.”
The line clicked dead.
And I realized, with sudden nauseating clarity, that our encounter in the Californian fog wasn’t the beginning of a mystery.
It was the beginning of a countdown.
The envelope with the burned-in handprint didn’t leave my desk for three days.
I didn’t sleep much during that time.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that thing’s silhouette clinging to the redwood—its head cocked, eyes unblinking, breath clicking like an alien metronome. But the object in my apartment felt even more unsettling than the creature itself. Because the creature was a moment—an encounter, a memory. But this?
This was proof.
Somebody had taken real risk to mail me that bark sample. Someone who had been close—too close—to one of those beings. Someone who believed I should know that whatever lived in those ancient trees was expanding its territory.
I couldn’t stop thinking about his last words before the line disconnected:
“The ones in the trees.”
Not animals.
Not anomalies.
Not one creature.
A species.
An entire species.
My hands trembled as I touched the compressed bark. Even after drying in transit, it was slightly softer along the indented “fingers,” as though the pressure that created the imprint had compressed organic fibers at a microscopic level. The four narrow, deep grooves… the central “palm” cavity… it perfectly matched the ground impressions we found under the cathedral tree.
The idea that the individual we saw was just one of many made something old and instinctive curl tightly in my stomach.
Humans weren’t the apex of every environment.
We liked to pretend we were, but the truth was far more fragile.
I should have turned the sample in.
Should have contacted someone.
Should have filed a report.
I did none of those things.
Because I already knew what the official response would be: the same scripted dismissal, the same bureaucratic smothering of truth under the weight of “misidentified wildlife.” They would neutralize my testimony, bury the sample in a warehouse, and pretend the forest didn’t pulse with pale shapes moving silently through the fog.
So instead, I called Valori.
He didn’t answer the first time.
Or the second.
On the third attempt, he finally picked up—but he didn’t say hello.
“Where did you get it?” he asked immediately.
I froze.
“You don’t even know what I’m talking about.”
“I do,” he said, voice low and shaky. “Because I got one too.”
My skin went cold.
“What do you mean you got one too?” I asked.
“An envelope,” he replied. “No return address. Inside was a piece of bark with a grip impression carved into it. Same shape as the one we saw near the base of the cathedral tree. And a message.”
“What message?”
A long silence followed, broken only by his harsh breathing.
“‘You were lucky.’ That’s all it said.”
The room felt suddenly smaller.
Hotter.
Tighter.
“Lucky?” I repeated. “Lucky how?”
“You know the answer, Marlo.” His voice cracked. “If it wanted to, it could’ve come down that tree and closed the distance in seconds.”
He wasn’t wrong.
We saw how fast it moved vertically.
We had no reason to believe it wasn’t just as fast horizontally.
“Someone’s watching us,” I said. “And not just them. Humans too. Someone who knows what these things are.”
“No,” he replied. “Someone who’s afraid of what they are.”
That distinction mattered.
Two days later, the world got darker.
I received a text message from a number I didn’t recognize.
“DO NOT GO INTO THE WOODS ALONE.”
“THEY ARE MORE ACTIVE IN FOG.”
“CHECK YOUR MAILBOX.”
My pulse spiked.
I walked slowly down the stairs from my apartment, each step sounding too loud in the empty corridor. The building was quiet—too quiet. Even the usual hum of traffic outside felt muffled, as if the world were bracing for something it didn’t yet understand.
At the mailbox cluster, tucked neatly into slot 2B, was another padded envelope.
I took it inside before opening it.
This package didn’t contain bark.
It contained a map.
A topographic forest survey of the northern California redwood preserve—covered in red markings. Eight separate points had been circled. Five had been crossed out with thick strokes. Three remained unmarked.
Attached was a note typed in the same courier font as the previous one:
“Lost hikers.
Sightings.
Missing teams.
These are not coincidences.”
And below that:
“Three active zones remain.
Do not approach.”
My breath caught.
Someone—some group—was tracking these entities. Monitoring their migrations. Studying their patterns. And the “lost hikers” that made yearly headlines… weren’t lost at all.
They had encountered the pale ones.
And the pale ones had not let them go.
Suddenly, my military instincts awoke like a fire burning through my skull: this wasn’t just a biological mystery. This was an operational threat. A strategic one. A hidden apex lurking in the vast ecosystems we naively assumed were ours.
I had to inform someone.
Not the military—they were compromised by protocol.
Not wildlife agencies—they were clearly out of the loop.
Not law enforcement—they’d think I was insane.
That left only one option:
I needed to return to the forest myself.
But not alone.
I called Valori again.
He answered immediately.
“You got another package, didn’t you,” he said, voice hollow.
“Yes.”
“What now?”
His question carried the weight of a man asking whether we were ready to face something not meant for human confrontation.
I swallowed.
“We need to go back.”
He didn’t argue.
Didn’t protest.
Didn’t laugh.
He simply said—
“Tell me when.”
We drove out under overcast skies, the kind of thick gray blanket that smothered sunlight and seemed to encourage fog to form ahead of schedule. The deeper we went into forest country, the quieter everything became. Civilians disappeared. Houses thinned. Phone signal dropped. It felt like descending into a different world—a world older than roads, older than nations.
We parked seven miles north of the official trailhead.
No tourists ventured this far.
No campers braved the warning signs about unstable terrain and “protected wildlife habitat.”
But the map suggested something else entirely:
Active Zone 3 was somewhere beyond this point.
Dusk approached fast. Fog crept between the trunks like a living organism. The silence hit us first—deep, consuming, unnatural, as if every creature within miles had fled or was hiding.
“Marlo,” Valori whispered, “doesn’t this feel familiar?”
“It feels exactly like the night we saw it.”
“No,” he said, swallowing hard. “It feels worse.”
We trekked deeper.
Every hundred yards, we found signs—none of them human.
First sign: a compression on the side of a redwood about ten feet up.
Second sign: another radial ground imprint, slightly fresher than the ones from months earlier.
Third sign: a cluster of snapped branches fifteen feet overhead—not broken outward, like a bear climbing, but inward, as though something had hung from them.
Then we heard it.
Not close.
Not loud.
But clear enough to freeze us mid-step:
Click. Click-click. Wheeze. Click.
A pattern.
A message.
Fog twisted between trunks. Shadows thickened. The world narrowed into a tunnel of trees and sound.
“Marlo…” Valori whispered, voice trembling without shame, “…there’s more than one.”
I already knew.
Because the clicking wasn’t coming from one direction.
It was coming from three.
Left.
Right.
Ahead.
Triangulated.
Coordinated.
They were surrounding us.
Valori raised his rifle—not to fire, but because pointing it at something made the human instinct feel less naked.
Shapes began to move in the fog—pale silhouettes clinging to trunks, vertical shadows sliding smoothly between branches.
And then I realized something that chilled me deeper than any military threat ever had:
They weren’t hunting.
They were herding.
Pushing us deeper into the forest.
Cutting off retreat.
Penning us like sheep.
My voice barely worked.
“Valori. Back up. Slowly.”
We tried.
We really did.
But when we turned, a pale shape dropped from a high branch behind us—silently—landing with such fluid grace it barely disturbed the needles beneath its “hands.” It didn’t attack. Didn’t lunge.
It simply stood there.
Blocking our exit.
Its head tilted.
Its mouth widened into something that might have been a smile if evolution had taken a more cruel direction.
And then—
It spoke.
Not English.
Not words.
But a perfect imitation of a sound burned into my nightmares—
Click. Wheeze-click. Click-click.
Valori’s breath shattered.
My legs locked.
My heart slammed.
Then another responded.
And another.
They were communicating.
And we were the subject.
