Chapter Twenty
"Are you scared?" Nick turned to check on me, and I didn’t bother pretending I wasn’t exhausted.
I didn’t know what prompted his question.
I hadn’t spoken or made a sound. For the past half hour, I’d been following him like a trusted dog through the woods.
We were both tired, and our conversation had long since run its course.
We trudged uphill, my legs burning with each step, then descended again.
I was adrift, disoriented, and steeped in misery.
Then Nick turned back to the path and froze. Concerned, I stopped dead in my tracks beside him. "What is it?"
A deer stumbled onto the path, its movements stiff and erratic, like a puppet on tangled strings. It halted before us, its glassy eyes fixed in our direction but seemingly unaware.
"Nick," I whispered.
He extended an arm, guiding me to stay close.
The deer’s body was grotesquely distorted, as if it had been pieced together by a blind taxidermist. It gasped for breath, its ribs threatening to pierce the paper-thin skin.
Its fur was dull and matted, with limbs splayed at unnatural angles.
One antler was severed, leaving only a jagged stump.
There was no blood, no visible wound. But something truly horrific had happened to it.
I could only fathom that it had been ravaged, mangled into a macabre parody of what it had been.
"What the hell is that?" I whispered.
I feared the animal was sick, that it might attack us. But the deer didn’t move. It stood rigid, its unblinking gaze trained on us. Then, slowly, it turned its head away. Without a sound, it stumbled back into the woods.
I let out a trembling exhale.
Nick turned to me and I hurried to say, "I’m alright, I’m alright. It’s just a deer. They’re not aggressive, right?"
"No, they aren’t. Do you want to turn back?"
"I don’t know."
"Let’s walk a little further, and if we don’t find anything in the next fifteen minutes, we can go back."
We pressed on, prolonging my suffering. The branches clawed at my head, tugging strands of hair free from my ponytail.
Beneath my feet, the root system stretched like a twisted, organic labyrinth, or a swirl of snakes frozen mid-slither.
My gaze darted to them again and again as we moved, a cold dread building inside me, waiting for the moment they might begin to writhe.
Nick showed no signs of slowing. He moved with a relentless determination, his focus razor-sharp, his fatigue buried beneath whatever obsession drove him forward.
He led us up the game trail, and I followed closely without protest. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I trusted him.
It wasn’t as though he claimed to be an expert at navigating the woods.
But there was something about him, something in the way he carried himself, his quiet confidence, the way he’d instinctively positioned himself between me and the animal without hesitation. That spoke volumes.
I had just begun to wonder when the fifteen minutes would be up, too tired even to pull out my phone to check the time, when Nick stopped again, his arm shooting back to halt me.
My senses, dulled by depletion, barely registered why we’d stopped. It took a moment to process, and then I reacted with a frightened gasp.
In front of us, sprawled across the game trail like a macabre spectacle, lay the deer.
Its lifeless body seemed to stare accusingly into the rain-soaked undergrowth, eyes fixed in a permanent, glassy terror.
It was the same deer from before, its missing antler and twisted body a grim sight.
But now, its legs were bent at impossible angles, its belly torn open with surgical precision.
There was no sign of scavengers. No ragged tears, no feeding marks.
Just a dark, empty wound, gaping open as though something had scooped out its insides, leaving behind a hollow shell.
The sight was so ghastly that I was scared to look away, fearful that the deer would suddenly twitch to life.
Nick stepped forward cautiously, his shoe hovering over the deer’s flank, before pressing down gently. The body didn’t yield. It was stiff, locked in place by rigor mortis. A wave of nausea washed over me.
"It’s been dead for a while," Nick announced flatly.
"How is that possible?" My voice was shaky. I wasn’t sure of the exact timing, but I knew enough to understand that rigor mortis would take more than a quarter of an hour to set in.
Nick didn’t answer. Instead, his gaze shifted upward, fixing on a massive tree, its trunk looming ominously beside the fallen deer.
"Check this out," he said, voice low.
Only then did I see it. The symbol etched into the bark was a circle of twisted lines containing an eye that seemed to watch us with malignant intent. That was the symbol from Amanda’s photo, the same one Lucas had tried to sketch on the Post-it note. I was sure of it.
My pulse hammered in my chest. I stared at it, unable to look away, entranced. "Is this—?"
Nick nodded silently, pulling out his phone to snap a picture.
He didn’t need to say it. I knew we were on the right path.
We pushed forward, my tiredness fading almost entirely, replaced by a heightened sense of alertness.
The game trails twisted and tangled, forcing us to navigate around massive boulders and fallen trees.
I spotted a couple of snakes slithering through the leaf litter, but they vanished before the fear could take root.
I knew bears roamed these woods, but now, a deeper, more unsettling dread crept in, the thought that we might run into the people who felt at home here.
The ones who had left their mark on the tree.
Once again, Nick halted abruptly, and I stumbled into his back.
"What the fuck?"
I peered around him, my heart racing as dizziness set in. We’d been walking in a relatively straight line, or so I thought, but now, before us, lay the dead deer. The same one. Beside it stood the tree with the eye-shaped symbol, its hollow gaze fixed on us.
My mind spun, struggling to make sense of what I was seeing. Had we been walking in circles? How had we ended up back here?
We exchanged a look, and Nick spoke hesitantly, "It’s okay. We must’ve made a full circle without realizing it. It’s easy to get lost in the woods."
But his words did nothing to calm my nerves.
"I’d rather we turn back," I said anxiously.
Nick’s eyes softened. "I know how to get back from here. Do you trust me?"
I nodded, and he gave my arm a reassuring squeeze before stepping back onto the path. This time, he made sure we were walking in a straight line. I wished, for a moment, that we had a pocket knife to mark the trees and keep track of where we were. But neither of us had thought to bring one.
The scenery was changing, though the boulders and fallen trees were unrecognizable. Then again, we were deep in the woods. Someone unfamiliar with nature might struggle to tell one tree from another. I was, after all, a city dweller.
"Fucking hell!" Nick swore, and I knew why even before I looked. We’d circled back to the same spot. The deer. The tree. The symbol.
A hollow weight settled in my gut, spreading like a slow, insidious chill through my ribs. "What’s going on? How are we ending up in the same spot?"
Nick stood there, hesitant, his eyes scanning the surroundings. "I don’t know."
It felt impossible. No, it was impossible.
Once, maybe, but twice? I was sure we hadn’t made a circle, and we were far off the trail, still three miles from the car.
The woods grew increasingly uninviting, even dangerous.
I felt a persistent, unsettling awareness that our solitude was not as complete as it seemed to be.
"Let’s get out of here. Please."
Nick slipped his hand into mine, guiding me toward the trail without a word. His pace didn’t falter, his hold steady, leaving me no choice but to follow. No matter how tired I was, I didn’t mind pushing through. The feeling of eyes watching our backs kept me moving.
Nick stopped again, his head tilting as he strained to listen. "Do you hear that?"
"Hear what?" I strained to hear, every fiber attuned to the faint sounds around me: the rustle of leaves, the creaking of wooden limbs that seemed to signal the presence of unseen animals nearby. My eyes flicked nervously through the trees, but there was no movement.
"Nothing. Let’s go," he said, resuming his pace.
By my calculations, we should have reached the trail by now.
But I wasn’t sure I trusted my perception of time and distance.
Everything was distorted, warped by fear and confusion.
Was it getting darker? Or was my frazzled mind playing tricks on me?
The overcast sky offered no help, obscuring any sense of time.
The woods around us felt alive, filled with presence.
I fought to keep panic at bay, steadying my breath and clinging to whatever rationality I had left.
The earth itself seemed to conspire against me, with roots reaching up to trip me, and mud sucking at my feet. But I dared not look down. I couldn’t risk losing sight of Nick, even for a second.
Just when I thought I’d shatter, Nick held back a branch, revealing the trail. I gulped in relief, feeling the pressure coming off. Now, at least, we were on the marked path.
"It’s okay, we’re almost out," he said, helping me onto the trail. "Can you walk?"
I nodded. If I had to, I’d run and not stop until we reached the safety of the car.
"Do you think we were hallucinating?" I asked, still trying to make sense of it. "Maybe it was some kind of fungus or something."
"I thought about that," Nick said. "But if we’d inhaled something that strong, it wouldn’t just stop the second we stepped outside. And shared hallucinations are rare."
"But not impossible?"