They Warned Us Never to Answer the Dark. One Night, We Did.

I was twenty-two the summer of 1889, and so broke I would have taken a shovel to Hell itself if it came with a bedroll and three meals a day, which is how I ended up on a rail crew cutting track through a stretch of high country the company maps called Section Twelve and the locals didn’t like to call anything at all. The line belonged to an outfit out of Denver, and our camp sat in a shallow, starved valley where scrub grass grew in thin, defeated patches, the dust worked its way into your teeth and blankets, and the wind came in hard and left harder, slicing through canvas like it wasn’t there. At dawn the ground still held the night’s cold like stone pulled out of a river, but by noon the sun burned the back of your neck raw and the steel of the rails could blister a careless hand. Most days the world narrowed to the snap of orders, the ring of iron on spikes, the scrape of shovels, the creak of leather and timber, and far-off animal calls from things we never saw and didn’t think too hard about.

There were twenty of us on that stretch, men scavenged from the loose edges of the country: ex-soldiers who couldn’t settle, drifters who’d lost more than they’d ever admit, and boys like me who still believed sore muscles meant we were climbing toward something better. Our foreman, Briggs, was a broad man with a chest like a freight stove, a harsh smoker’s voice, and a face that looked carved out of old wood that had never learned how to smile. He cared about schedule and rails and not much else; a man could drink himself senseless every night and curse the company all day as long as he stood where he was told when the whistle blew. My bunkmate was Eli, a thin fellow with careful telegrapher’s hands and the habit of watching the horizon instead of the fire. He’d strung wires for years before the rails called him west, and he spoke softly, if at all, until night settled. Then there was Morgan, big and loud, a man built like a bull and proud of it, who laughed often, arm-wrestled anyone foolish enough to accept, and met every story with a challenge to make it wilder. Tomas worked the spikes with a steady, almost musical rhythm, dark eyes thoughtful under his hat, speaking little English but understanding more than anyone gave him credit for. And then there was Jonas, in a tent set a little apart at the edge of camp, older than most of us, gray at the temples, eyes that never stopped moving, hired on as a guide and scout. He knew the country like a man knows his scars, could smell weather before it rolled in, and had a way of listening to locals that made them relax; the others said he’d trapped and traded with the people further south for years, and though he never confirmed it, you could hear that truth in the way he chose his words.

On the company map, Section Twelve was just a printed stretch of black ink between two neat gridlines, a problem to be solved with timber, sweat, and iron, but standing there it was ridges and gullies and silent slopes where our noise seemed to fall away too quickly, like the land was swallowing it. Each day we pushed the track a little farther: clearance in the morning, ties in the afternoon, steel as the sun sank, hammers rising and falling until arms shook and palms split open. I bled through my gloves twice that first week and thought it meant I was earning my place. We cut a routine into the days: wake before dawn, choke down coffee and beans, file out to the line, work until the light turned thin and gold, march back to camp for stew and stale bread, cards or pipe smoke or straight collapse after. At night the fire threw a mean circle of light, and beyond that was nothing but black ground and sky and the knowledge that the world didn’t end where our lanterns did, but something else started there.

The first small break in that rhythm came near sunset one evening when three local riders appeared on the low rise west of camp, wrapped in faded blankets despite the dry heat, their horses picking slowly down the slope. They didn’t ride straight into us, didn’t shout, didn’t wave. They stopped just outside the glow of our fire and waited the way people do when they’re not sure if they’re welcome. We all noticed them, of course: work tools slowed, talk thinned out, and men started finding small reasons to stand closer to the center of camp. Briggs wiped his hands on his trousers and walked out to meet them, arms folded, jaw already tightening like he expected trouble. “What can we do for you?” he asked, his voice flat. The riders didn’t answer immediately. The oldest of them let his gaze drift over the camp, over our line of tents and stacked crates and leaning tools, past all of that up toward the hills where our rails would soon bite into the stone. His eyes lingered on a rocky ridge to the east with a narrow, darker notch cut into it, a place we hadn’t reached yet but all of us had noticed, if only because the land there looked wrong in some way we couldn’t name.

Jonas joined Briggs and spoke to the men in their tongue, the words low and steady like he’d used that language more than once. Their shoulders eased a little when they heard him, and they talked for a while in voices too low for us to catch properly, but we drifted closer anyway, pretending to check harness or stir the pot while our ears stole what they could. Morgan muttered that they probably wanted payment for crossing their land. Another man said maybe they were chasing someone, or warning us about a flood; we were all wrong. Eventually Jonas turned back to Briggs, his expression tighter than I’d ever seen it. He said the men were from a settlement beyond the hills. They’d seen the line we were forcing through and had ridden hard to warn us about a ravine ahead, not for reasons of land or water or hunting, but because of something that moved through that place after dark and did not care who owned the right-of-way.

Briggs snorted, because that was his answer to anything that didn’t fit into a ledger. “Company’s paid for this line,” he said. “No ravine or campfire tale is going to change that.” Jonas didn’t argue with him, not out loud, but the old rider spoke again anyway, eyes never leaving Jonas’s face. When Jonas translated, he did it slowly, like each word cost him something to drag over. The man said there are places where the world is thin, where certain things cross that aren’t meant to brush against us, and people are supposed to walk wide around those spots. The ravine ahead was one of them. The thing in it had once been a person, long ago, who’d broken some grave promise and been cursed or twisted into something else—something that could wear the shape of a man without understanding what a man was, something that fed on fear and blood and could call to you with any voice it liked, but never quite right, because it didn’t know how a soul sat behind words. Around me, I felt men shift their weight, snort, spit, cross themselves quietly, or look away as if that would keep the idea from sticking. Morgan laughed under his breath and said he didn’t scare easy and certainly not from ghost stories dressed up as warnings. Briggs’s patience frayed. He told Jonas to say we’d be careful and keep moving.

The old man listened to that answer without changing his expression, then looked past all of us again to the ridge and the dark notch cut into it. His jaw worked once. He spoke one last time and Jonas’s voice turned flatter when he relayed it: if we had to cross that ravine—which we would, if the company had its way—we should remember three things. Don’t answer a voice in the dark unless you can see who is speaking. Don’t follow footsteps that don’t belong to any man you know. And if someone comes back from the shadows looking wrong in a way you can’t explain, remember that not everything wearing a man’s body is still human. With that, the riders turned and went back into the dusk without asking for food, money, or rest. Their horses carried them toward the hills until the three of them vanished into the tall grass and the coming dark.

After they left, camp noise returned too loud and too quickly, the way people talk when they’re trying not to think about something. Some of the men scoffed and called it superstition. Others stopped laughing and watched the eastern ridge as the light drained away. I pretended not to care, made some joke about old men telling stories to feel important, but when I lay on my bunk that night staring at the tent roof, it wasn’t Morgan’s voice I heard in my head, or Briggs’s—it was the old rider’s flat, tired warning and the way his eyes had looked like a man watching a fire about to jump a line. We marched out toward Section Twelve at dawn, steel and ties and sledges on our shoulders, and I found myself counting the men more often than usual, lips moving silently: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. I told myself it was habit, but every time I finished I checked again, as if something might have slipped into our number between steps.

The closer we drew to the part of the map where the ravine cut across our path, the more the land changed. The scrub thinned until the soil showed through in a dull, unhealthy gray. The air grew heavy without getting hotter, like it was thicker somehow, hard to pull all the way into your lungs. Even the sound of our tools seemed to bounce back at us wrong; hammers rang, but the echoes died too fast. Men stopped talking between blows. Orders were given shorter and sharper. By midday we reached the start of the cut, a shallow wound in the earth running across our intended route to the east, where it deepened into a darker split that fell away out of sight. Jonas walked ahead with his hands on his hips, studying the lay of the land, his boots scuffing carefully at the edge. Briggs joined him, and they stood together for a while saying nothing, just staring at the notch where the ravine fell into shadow.

“We can bridge most of this easy,” Briggs said finally when we drew up behind them. “That deeper part, now, that’ll be the bastard, but nothing we haven’t done before.” Jonas didn’t answer right away. His gaze followed the ravine’s line into the east, where the cut narrowed and darkened, swallowing light a little too quickly. At length he asked for a day to walk the rim before they decided exactly how to cross it. Briggs cursed about delays, squinted at the rock face again, then reluctantly agreed. A broken leg would cost more than a day if the ground was as unstable as it looked. We pitched a smaller work camp near the shallow cut, just enough tents and gear to see us through a night or two. Even Morgan was quieter stringing canvas that afternoon. Every so often, I’d see him glance toward the ravine and then away like the sight of it irritated him.

Near sunset, Jonas took a lantern and a rifle, said he was going to circle the ravine and learn its moods before dark set in proper. Briggs told him to be back by full dark and reminded him no one would climb down there after him if he twisted an ankle at night. Jonas just nodded and walked out alone, his silhouette cutting a steady line along the rim as the light died. After supper, most of us drifted to the fire, bowls in hand, letting the heat reach into our sore backs and shoulders. Bean steam and coffee curled up into the cooling air. Eli sat near me, back bent, his tin mug turning slowly in his hands, his eyes never staying on the flames long—they kept sliding to the ragged edge of light where camp ended and dark began. “You heard what they said,” he murmured, voice nearly lost under the crackle. “About that thing that wears people.” I nodded, because everyone had heard and no one had quite forgotten. “I’ve run wires through land with stories,” he went on. “Always ends up being a man, or a mountain lion somebody made bigger in their head. Still… this place feels off in a way I can’t put to words.”

Morgan, hearing him, snorted and said every patch of dirt between here and California had a legend—spirits, witches, strange lights, whatever folks needed to explain things going wrong. “Rail don’t care,” he added. “Steel goes where we drive it.” Tomas sat on a crate with his plate resting on his knees, saying nothing, his eyes moving from face to face, then beyond, matching each voice to a body almost unconsciously. I realized I was doing the same thing: every time someone spoke from the shadows, I checked with my eyes that the shape I thought belonged to them actually moved.

The night cooled fast once the sun was gone. The stars came out sharp and cold. The fire’s glow felt smaller than it had at our last camp, like the darkness crowded closer. Talk thinned as men peeled off to their tents, until only a handful of us remained—me, Eli, Morgan, two others, and Briggs with his pocket watch, glancing at it more often than the flames. When he snapped it shut with a frown, I knew what was coming. “Jonas should’ve been back,” he said. He grabbed a spare lantern, jerked his head. “You, you, you, and you. With me.” Eli stood up before the last word left his mouth. Briggs pointed at me and Morgan, and one of the older hands, and we fell in behind as he walked out of camp toward the ravine.

The lantern light jerked and stretched shadows as we moved, making tents and crates look like hunched men in the corner of my eye. The murmurs of the camp fell behind us until it was just boots on loose stone and that thin, constant sound of water somewhere below. The air cooled even more near the ravine’s edge, the kind of cold that feels older than weather. Briggs held up his hand and we stopped. “Jonas!” he called, voice carrying along the rim and dropping down into the cut. The ravine answered with the soft echo of his shout and the faint rush of water; nothing else. We picked our way along the edge, far enough from the drop to be safe, close enough that the lanterns lit the top of the opposite wall, pale stone rising in jagged teeth. In some places the rock thrust outward; in others it fell sheer, leaving pockets of deeper darkness.

“Here,” Eli said, his voice thin. He pointed at a patch of disturbed dust near an outcrop. Bootprints crossed the ground, the heel of one worn down on the outer edge. Jonas walked with a slight turn; you saw it in his stride if you watched him from behind. I saw that same cant in the prints. They led out onto a narrow tongue of rock hanging over the ravine. When I edged closer and leaned out with my lantern, I saw a ledge below, just wide enough for a careful man to navigate. Fresh scuffs streaked the wall where boots had slid. Briggs cursed low. “Damn fool climbed down,” he said. Eli stared into the dark. “Why would he do that alone?” None of us had an answer.

We listened. The thin ribbon of water at the ravine’s bottom played its quiet music. Now and then, a pebble shifted as the land settled in its sleep. Nothing else. Briggs set his jaw and bellowed, “Jonas! Answer if you hear me!” For a heartbeat there was only our breathing and that distant water. Then a voice rose from below. “I hear you,” it called. It was Jonas’s voice. The words were clear enough. But they landed wrong in my chest. The tone was nearly perfect, the way the consonants clipped, the roughness at the edge, but something in the shape of the pauses, the way the breath came, was… off, like a song played on a badly tuned instrument. There was no strain in it, no panting, no ragged gulp that should have followed a climb down a steep wall.

Briggs didn’t notice; his shoulders eased a fraction. “Where are you?” he shouted. “You hurt?” “Down here,” the voice answered. “Follow the ledge. It is safe.” That last sentence was what did it for me. Jonas never said anything was safe. He said it was possible, or could be managed, or needed a rope. He would have told us to stay put until daylight or until he climbed up to us. He would not have invited four tired men onto a narrow ledge at night. The words were right, but they had no Jonas in them. Eli moved closer to me. “That isn’t right,” he whispered. My mouth had gone dry. The old man’s warning about answering voices you couldn’t see tore through my head like a cold wind. I couldn’t find any ordinary reason for that wrongness, and the lack of an explanation scared me more than any story.

Briggs took a step toward the outcrop. “We’re coming down,” he called. I grabbed his arm harder than I meant to. “Wait,” I said. “We can’t see him.” He turned on me fast. “You want to leave him down there?” “He wouldn’t call us along a ledge in the dark,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level. “You know he wouldn’t. He’s careful.” Morgan shifted his weight, torn between his respect for Jonas and his respect for Briggs’s orders. Eli stood rigid, eyes wide, his fingers tightening on his lantern’s handle. The cold pressed closer. The flame in my lamp looked smaller.

The voice came again from the black below. “Hurry,” it said. “It is not safe to wait.” Same flat tone, same lack of breath. If he’d hurt his leg, he would have been gritting the words out between pain. Instead, it sounded like each word was being dropped in front of the next from a great distance. A small scrape of something on stone followed, like a foot adjusting on a narrow perch. Briggs hesitated, for the first time that I’d seen. His jaw clenched and unclenched. He looked from the black slice of ravine to Eli’s strained face, to my hand still on his arm. Instead of shaking me off, he stepped back. “Fine,” he said. “We hold till first light. If he’s stuck, we’ll get him out when we can see.” Something unclenched in my chest at that, and from the sound of Eli’s breath I knew he’d been holding his own.

We turned to head back. We’d barely taken a few steps when we heard it: footsteps on stone, coming from the ravine. Not ours. Not the stagger of a man with an injured leg climbing with his hands and feet. These were light, quick, oddly placed—as if someone were testing the wall instead of climbing it. They moved upward a few strokes, then stopped. Briggs turned, lantern swinging back toward the ledge. He called again. No answer came this time. The water whispered below; the night swallowed everything else. None of us said what we were thinking—that whatever had answered us wasn’t Jonas, and now it knew exactly where we were standing.

By the time we walked back into camp, the men were awake. It’s a strange thing, walking into a ring of your own people and realizing they’ve been listening the whole time; faces were turned toward us, eyes sharp with the kind of fear men don’t acknowledge by name. Briggs told them Jonas had gone down into the ravine and we’d wait until daylight to fetch him. Some muttered worry; others crossed themselves or spat into the dirt. No one mentioned the voice sounding strange. Maybe they hadn’t heard. Maybe they had and didn’t want to believe it. The fire burned low, casting long, jittery shadows. No one sat close to the tents anymore.

Eli pulled me aside by our canvas flap. His voice shook despite his effort to pin it down. “That wasn’t him,” he said. “You know it wasn’t.” I nodded. “I know.” “So something else down there can talk like him.” We let that sit between us like a stone. “We stick together tonight,” I said finally. “Don’t go anywhere alone.” He nodded once and didn’t argue. Sleep, when it came, was thin and shallow, like skimming over the top of a dark pond. Every brush of canvas sounded like a hand. Every creak in the wagon made my fingers close around nothing, searching for a hammer I’d left outside.

It was still dark when a voice pulled me out of that uneasy half-sleep. Not a shout, not a cry—just my foreman’s name spoken clearly: “Briggs.” The sound pushed straight through the tent wall. For a moment I thought it was dawn call, but there was no whistle, no stir of men pulling on boots, and the light seeping through the canvas was weak, the color of coal smoke, flickering like lantern-flame, not sunrise. I pushed myself up, heart jumping, and listened. The voice came again. “Briggs.” It was Jonas’s voice. Close. Inside camp. And just as wrong as the one from the ravine.

I reached over and shook Eli’s shoulder. He jolted upright, eyes wild for a second until the voice floated in again, steadier, closer. “Briggs, come here.” Eli froze, every line of his body going tight. “That isn’t him,” he breathed. We heard a lantern snap open outside, and then another. Boots hit dirt. Briggs stepped out of his tent with a lantern held high, the flame trembling slightly in his hand. Men peered from their tent flaps, eyes wide and sleepless. The voice called again, now from somewhere between the tents: “Briggs. Come here.” It was wrong to hear that tone coming from no direction you could put a face on.

Briggs turned slowly, lantern swinging. “Jonas,” he called, forcing steel into his voice. “Where are you?” Silence clung for a moment. Then something stepped into the edge of the light. For half a breath, I thought it was Jonas—same rough outline, same coat, same hat brim. But then the details caught up with my eyes. The arms hung too long, the shoulders pinched the wrong way, like the jacket was draped over a frame it hadn’t been cut for. The head was tilted at an angle no man holds his neck. The face was almost, almost right, but not in the way a brother looks like a brother; more like someone had described Jonas’s face to a blind sculptor and he’d gotten it close enough to fool you at a distance, but not up close. The eyes were the worst. They caught the lantern light in a sharp gleam like an animal’s, not with the dull shine of a man’s.

“Briggs,” it said again, and hearing that voice coming from that almost-face weak in all the wrong places made my stomach twist. The sound was a perfect copy but completely empty. No irritable patience, no weariness, no breath. Just recorded sound pushed back at us. Briggs, stubborn and slow to fright, took one step backward anyway. The men gathered behind him drew in a collective breath. The thing took another step forward, stiff and jerky like it didn’t quite understand where its joints were supposed to bend. Its boots dragged slightly, like it wasn’t used to their weight. “Come here,” it said, lifting one too-long arm, the sleeve hanging oddly off whatever passed for its forearm.

Briggs raised his lantern higher, as if more light might force the figure to resolve itself into his missing guide. It didn’t. The more we saw of it, the worse it became. The features never quite settled. The eyes never blinked. The skin looked stretched, like wet paper pulled over something that wasn’t built to stand upright. “What in hell is that?” Morgan whispered beside me, not loud enough for Briggs to hear, but loud enough that several men near us flinched as if the word hell itself might invite something.

The thing seemed to study us. Then it cocked its head further—too far, like the neck had no bones—and in the same borrowed voice said, “It is safe.” The exact words from the ravine. Same pacing. Same lack of strain. That was the moment Briggs broke free of his need to deny. His face twisted in a way I’d never seen, fear fighting command. He stepped back fast, almost stumbling. “Stay where you are,” he snapped, voice shaking despite the order in it. “Nobody moves.” The creature paused mid-step. Its raised arm hung in the air, then dropped in a way that was more like falling than lowering. Its eyes swept the circle of men slowly, no recognition in them, just a flat, bright animal awareness.

It twitched then, once, like something had fired the wrong muscle. Its legs bent sideways before straightening, it dropped into a crouch with an ugly crack in its posture, and then it moved—fast. Not a man’s run, not even a wolf’s; it skittered, legs pumping in short, rapid bursts, body too low, hands scraping dirt, like all forgotten ways of moving were being tried at once. It shot past the nearest tent before anyone reacted, vanishing into the shadows at the edge of camp. Shouts broke loose. A lantern went flying, smashed on a rock, oil sputtering. Another man ran for a shovel, swearing. Briggs yelled for formation, but the order was fighting raw panic.

A scream cut through the noise from over by the supply crates. We turned as one and saw a man stumbling back, clutching his shoulder. Blood ran bright between his fingers. Behind him, the creature crawled out from between two crates on all fours, rising as it moved, limbs too long, back arching into an ugly S-curve. Its head turned toward us with a sharp, birdlike snap, and in the lantern light its skin looked nearly translucent, pulled tight over thin, wrong bones. Morgan charged with a roar, swinging his shovel in a wide arc. The metal edge crashed against its arm and the impact sounded solid, but the creature only reeled for an instant before its gaze locked on him. “Help me,” it said, in Morgan’s own voice.

I saw that voice hit Morgan like a brick. His mouth fell open. His swing faltered. For a heartbeat, his body believed the sound more than his eyes believed the shape. The creature took that moment and slammed into him with enough force to knock him flat. His lantern went flipping, struck a rock, and went out, plunging that slice of camp into deeper dark. The creature moved over him in a jerky blur, limbs cutting against canvas and dirt. Morgan got his boots against its middle and kicked, yelling, buying himself a second.

Eli grabbed the first rock he could reach and hurled it with surprising speed. It struck the creature’s back, making a sick thud. The thing’s head snapped toward us, eyes flaring in the lantern glow. Tomas came in from the side, swinging a pickaxe like he was driving spikes. The point bit into the creature’s shoulder, and this time it made a sound, but not a scream—more like a burst of air forced out through a broken throat. It jerked away, half twisting in a movement that no spine should have allowed, and skittered backward into the dark gap between two tents, vanishing again before anyone could swing twice.

“Form up!” Briggs roared, voice ragged. “Nobody run off alone! Lanterns in, light in the middle!” We tightened around the fire, pulling all the light we had into one smaller circle. The creature had shown us its tricks: mimic voices, wear faces, hit and run. It wanted us scattered. We gave it the opposite. Someone helped Morgan to his feet. His forearm was torn in long, fingerlike streaks, skin ripped where something had gripped too hard. He was pale and sweating, but breathing. “Feels like it tried to drag the bone out of my arm,” he muttered through clenched teeth.

We stood shoulder to shoulder around the fire, every man holding something—hammers, shovels, sticks of burning wood, crowbars, a broken rail tie. The wind seemed to die completely. The flames climbed straight up, unmoved, as if the air itself had forgotten how to move. The only sounds were the pop of sap in the wood and the harsh breathing of twenty men trying not to show each other how scared they were. Then, from just beyond the reach of our light, we heard footsteps again. Slow this time. Deliberate. Circling. Every head turned, but no one could pin the sound to a shape. It moved around us in a careful arc, never rushing, never stumbling, the way a wolf would circle a pen, measuring fence posts.

“Stay sharp,” Briggs said under his breath. The footsteps stopped. The silence that followed felt heavier than the sound. Then Jonas’s voice floated in from the dark again. “Let me in.” I knew right away it was the imitation, not him. The flatness was all wrong. The cadence was slightly off, the breath missing. The second time it said it—“Let me in, please”—the “please” dropped like a stone, as if the creature had heard the word in someone else’s mouth and was testing it without grasping what it did. “You’re not him,” Briggs said, louder now, lantern raised high. “Show yourself or get away from this camp.”

No answer. Instead, a faint clicking echoed from near the supply crates, like joints popping into place. Men lifted their lanterns, but the light showed only canvas and wood. Something moved in the corner of my eye, and then it was on us again, rushing the line. We saw just a pale blur and lunged instinctively, tools swinging. It pulled back at the last second, darting away before iron met skin. It tried again from the opposite side. Again it retreated at the last moment. It wasn’t trying to break through yet; it was testing our reactions, learning how far it could push before someone panicked.

“Don’t give it an opening,” Eli murmured, voice tight. “It’s waiting for someone to run.” The thing must have realized its stolen Jonas and Morgan voices weren’t working the way it wanted, because the next sound it made was different. “Help,” it called, high and thin, like a child calling from behind a tree. The hair on my arms rose. We had no children on that line. The sound touched something deep and human in the men around me; you could feel the flinch in the air. “Don’t listen to it,” Briggs snapped. “Nobody moves. Nobody answers.” The voice tried again, closer. “Help, I’m stuck,” it said, the words tumbling wrong over one another, the pitch too steady. It sounded like a recorder stuck on repeat. We held anyway. Not a man moved, though I could see the instinct in a few faces, that pull toward a crying child.

Time stretched. The creature grew quiet. The fire burned lower, but we dared not feed it too much, afraid sparks might give it more places to hide. Then, from the deeper dark beyond the far tents, another voice cut through—a rough, real one, full of breath and effort. “Get away from them!” Jonas. Not the borrowed Jonas. Him. His voice had weight and years in it, and for the first time all night something answered inside me that wasn’t fear. “Briggs!” he called again. “I’m here!”

A limping shape stepped into the far edge of the fire’s glow, and all at once it was clear what the imitation had been missing. Jonas’s shoulders sagged with exhaustion. His coat was torn, streaked with dust and dried blood, his hat gone, his hair matted with dirt. His left leg dragged behind him as if every step cost him. He lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the brightness. “Don’t come closer,” he said when Briggs instinctively took a step toward him. “I made it out. It followed me. Don’t give it what it wants.” His eyes went right past us to the black just beyond the tents. We heard a faint scuff then, like something shifting its weight.

“It wanted me to lead it back,” Jonas went on, voice hoarse. “Thing down there can’t climb easy. It needed a trail.” That was when the canvas of the nearest tent bulged inward, like something heavy had leaned against it from behind. Lanterns swung. Men turned as one. The bulge slid along the canvas, upward, the ridge pole creaking under the weight. Eli’s whisper brushed my ear: “It’s above us.” Two pale points of light pushed against the tent fabric where eyes might be, glowing faintly through the cloth. The creature crawled along the top of the tent on all fours, its limbs stretching the canvas tight. Then the seam gave way with a ripping sound, and the whole tent collapsed inward.

The thing rose up out of the tangled cloth, this time not bothering with any stolen face. In full firelight, it looked like a man’s shape pulled too tall and too thin, bones in the wrong places, joints bending a degree past what was decent. Its skin was the sick color of candle wax dragged over sticks. The eyes were deep pits that still managed to catch and reflect light, twin coins of damp glass. It stood there for half a heartbeat, full height, steam drifting off where the tent rope had burned its skin. Then it came at us.

The charge was a blur. It slammed into the line, knocking one man backwards into the fire pit and scattering embers. Someone else swung a pickaxe and clipped its side. It twisted in ways I didn’t know backs could twist, dodging partly, taking the blow partly, but never stopping. It reached for another man, fingers long and narrow, and would have had him if Briggs hadn’t crashed a length of rail tie into its side, knocking it sideways. It responded by smashing the back of its hand across his face, dropping him like a sack. Every swing we landed had force, but to the creature it seemed to register like annoyance more than injury. The only thing that truly made it recoil was when a burning brand came too close.

Jonas saw that before any of us. He staggered to the fire pit, grabbed a branch thick with flame, and held it out in front of him like a spear. “Over here!” he shouted at the creature, voice raw. It turned to him instantly, and for the first time there was something that might have been interest in its gaze. It lunged, and Jonas waited until the last possible second, then swung the burning branch up into its chest and face. The reaction was immediate and violent. Its whole body wrenched away as the flame touched it. A sound tore out of it like all the air in its body had been forced through a hole too small. It clawed at the ground, trying to get away, but Jonas stepped after it, pressing the fire close.

“Fire!” Jonas yelled. “It hates the fire!” That cut through the panic better than any order. Men dropped their hammers long enough to grab burning branches from the edges of the pit, raising them like torches, circling. The creature tried to dart between us, but each time it moved toward a gap, someone thrust flame into that space and it recoiled, its movements losing that careful, measured quality, turning jerky, panicked. Tomas slammed his pickaxe down on its shoulder again, and this time the crunch that followed sounded like bone giving way. Morgan, pale and shaking but furious, swung his shovel into its legs, nearly taking them out from under it.

We began to drive it, not out of camp, but into the heart of the fire itself. Every step it took backward, the heat grew worse. It slipped once, one long foot landing in a ring of embers, and if we’d doubted anything before, we saw true fear then. It thrashed, limbs spasming, trying to pull itself clear. The smell that hit us was something like burning hair and hot meat, but wrong in a way that made my stomach heave. Men shouted, wordless now. Briggs, blood running from his split lip, dragged himself up and got the rail tie into his hands again. “End it!” he roared, voice half broken. “Now!”

We didn’t fight like rail men anymore. We fought like cornered animals. Hammers rose and fell. Burning wood pressed in from all sides. The creature’s movements slowed, got less precise. Its long fingers scrabbled at the dirt, unable to find purchase as the heat ate at its lower limbs. It tried one last desperate rush straight up and out, but Jonas stepped into its path and rammed the blazing end of his branch under its jaw, forcing its head back. The way it shuddered then, every joint shaking, made something deep in me want to run, but I stayed because everyone else did.

Briggs lifted the rail tie over his head and brought it down across the thing’s skull with a wet, cracking thud. The creature collapsed as if something inside it had been cut loose. Its limbs sprawled at unnatural angles. For a second, they twitched in little convulsive jerks, like the last echoes of a terrible thought, and then they went still. No breath. No voice. No more shuffling steps just out of sight.

We stood there, every one of us, staring. No one cheered. No one whoops and slapped backs like I’ve seen after fights in towns. The only sound was the crackle of the fire and twenty men sucking air into chests that had forgotten how. Sweat stung my eyes, ran into the cracks of my hands. Eli’s shoulders shook once beside me, then stilled. Morgan leaned against a crate, his injured arm cradled tight, watching the creature’s body with hatred and something like pity mixed in.

Jonas limped closer, keeping a burning brand between himself and the corpse. He lowered the flame toward its face until the heat should have made any living thing flinch. Nothing. He waited another long moment, eyes narrowed, then nodded once. “It’s done,” he said quietly. “For now.” At that last word, a shiver ran through me. We didn’t lower our weapons right away. It took a full minute, maybe more, before anyone dared to look away.

We didn’t sleep that night. We fed the fire until it was almost too hot to stand near, kept every lantern burning. Men took turns standing closest to the body, brand in hand, watching for any hint of movement. It never came. As the sky paled at the edges, someone started quietly stacking spare wood. Briggs watched for a while, then said, “We burn it. Nothing of that goes into the ground.” Jonas nodded without hesitation. “Fire’s the only thing it feared,” he said. “So we give it more of what it hates.”

We built a pyre just beyond camp with broken crates and dry brush, anything that would catch quick and burn hot. Four men, faces tight, wrapped the thing’s body in what was left of the ruined tent canvas, careful not to let its skin touch their hands. Even dead, it felt wrong. They hauled it up onto the wood. When they stepped back, every man in camp took an involuntary step with them, as if the distance mattered. Jonas lit the pyre himself. Flames took hold fast, licking up over canvas and limb. There was a moment where the shape writhed as the heat tightened and curled everything, and my heart jerked, thinking it was alive again. But no sound came. Eventually the form collapsed into itself and blackened. The flames did what they always do: they erased detail, turned strange and familiar alike into ash.

By midmorning, all that was left of the creature was a dark, collapsed heap and a smell none of us ever quite forgot. Briggs gave one last look toward the ravine and said, “We’re pulling back. Section Twelve can wait for another crew or another route. Not my men in that cut again.” The company might have disagreed if they’d seen the books, but they weren’t there. We were. Men packed camp faster than I’d ever seen them move, shoulders bent and eyes always straying east. We marched away along our own unfinished line, and with each mile the air felt a little less heavy, the wind a little more like wind.

We camped again that night in the shelter of some pines, far from the ravine and whatever thin place in the world it marked. No one built a big fire. We kept to lanterns, close together. Nothing called our names. Nothing skittered just out of sight. The ordinary night sounds came back—crickets, wind through needles, the creak of leather. Men spoke more quietly than before, but they spoke, and that alone felt like a blessing. In the morning, we put more distance between ourselves and Section Twelve and never went back.

The company maps changed quietly a season later; the line curved wide around that ravine with a neat printed note about “unstable terrain.” The papers in Denver said nothing about thin places, or voices that wore your friend’s tongue, or things that hate fire. Those pieces stayed with us, the twenty men who had watched something wrong die under our blows and our fear. Eventually the crew scattered. Briggs took another job. Tomas went home. Morgan found work where the ground didn’t open under his feet. Eli and I rode together awhile longer, then split at a junction like rails going different ways.

As for me, I kept working the lines a few more years, but I never again dismissed a warning told in a low voice by someone whose eyes went distant when they spoke. When the wind dies too quickly at dusk and the world goes a little too quiet, I still find myself counting the people in camp, making sure every voice I hear has a face and a shape that fits it. Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, I hear my name spoken in the dark from somewhere I can’t quite place, and every hair on my neck rises until I remember where I am and who’s beside me. I never answer a voice I can’t see anymore. Not after Section Twelve. Not after the night something climbed out of the ravine wearing my friend’s face and learned how we sound when fear gets into our throats.