Speaker 1: It's not glamorous work, but it pays well and offers
opportunities for over time. After the divorce and the foreclosure,
after most of my friends stopped calling, County Maintenance was
steady enough, quiet, predictable, and away from the noise for
my life I was trying to avoid. I was assigned
a new job to do. Take the truck, follow the checklist,
tear down the old signs, like the trails as cleared,
move on. I was sitting in the diner the morning
before the job started, staring into a mug of burnt coffee,
pretending not to hear the old men at the corner
table watching me. One of them finally spoke up, some
trails don't want to be forgotten. The others gave a
chuckle at that. Half serious, half sarcastic, small town men
with too many years behind them, too familiar with bad stories,
too many bad stories told over whiskey and boredom. I
gave them the polite nod you learn to use when
you're too tired to argue. They're just signs, I said,
just trees. They didn't argue, They just kept watching me
finish my coffee. Truth was this route landed on my
lap because nobody else wanted it, not the younger guys,
not the retirees pulling half shifts to pad their pensions.
Even my supervisor didn't look me in the eye when
he gave me the paperwork. A lot of bad breakouts there,
he said, be careful, you step. I figured it was
the usual small town superstition. Faded trail markers, knell to
rotting trees weren't going to bite me. The bureaucracy doesn't
scare me. Not usually. The first few trails went by
without much to say for themselves, nothing unusual beyond how
quiet everything felt. No birds, no squirrels, not even the
hummer flies of a deadfall, just me and the trees,
the kind of silence you feel in your teeth. The
work itself stayed simple. Hike in, find the markers, pull
them down, lock the removal, move on. Every sign had
a name on it, stamped in wood and weather worn
to hell. Some of them I recognized from old missing
persons fliers, faces that used to hang by the register
and gas stations when I was a kid, memorials to
those lost and never found. Others dated further back than that,
Names passed down through town gossip, usually mentioned in the
same breath as bad luck or sad endings. It struck
me more than once, how strange it was the name
trails after people who'd gone missing on them. Stranger still,
how nobody ever bothered to mention that part when handing
me the job sheet. After a few days, things started
not lining up. I'd clear a path in the morning,
all the markers out, only to find some of them
back up by the afternoon. Same trees, samet bolts, sunk
into bark that should have been bare. Then there were
the footprints too narrow for my boots, moving across the
paths in places where no one should have been walking.
They never led anywhere, just stopped dead in the middle
of thick brush, or vanished outright on solid ground. The
radio gave me more static the deeper I went, Voices
sometimes faint and broken beneath the white noise. I couldn't
make out much at first, but after a while it
got clearer. Stop, turn back, leave it alone, always urgent,
always on the edge of words. I told myself it
had to be locals playing games, teens tapping into my
radio frequency. Maybe those old boys at the diner still
had enough spite in them to plant a CB somewhere
and mess with me. I thought about packing up early,
taking the right up, losing the overtime, but rent was due,
bills were stacked, and I couldn't stomach screwing up another job.
So I stayed, set up camp right in the thick
of it to finish quicker one more night. Then I'd
tear down the last of it and never look back.
Even as I hammered in the last stake and zip
my tent shut beneath those dead trees, I couldn't shake
the feeling I should have left already. That night, the
woods didn't pretend to sleep. I heard movement outside the
tent long before I unzipped it. Not footsteps exactly, not
anything that steady. Branches snapped, leaves shifted, and something mimicked
the short clipped beaps of my radio. Not words, just noise,
chopped and mechanical, trying to get the rhythm right without
understanding the purpose behind it. I sat in the dark, listening,
waiting for it to stop. When it didn't, I stepped
out with my flashlight and swept the trees beyond the camp.
For a second, I thought I saw a figure. It
was tall, bigger than anyone living ought to be, standing
too still between the trunks. My light didn't catch it properly.
I blinked. It was gone. I told myself it had
been a tree, a shadow, or a grazing animal I
had spooked away. When I tried the radio again, the
static gave way to words, not sentences, nothing conversational, just names,
names of trails I hadn't reached yet, names pulled straight
from my paperwork. Some I didn't even recognize. I didn't
sleep after that. By morning, every marker I had pulled
the day before had been reinstalled, not where I had
found them originally, but deeper into the woods, trees I
hadn't walked past yet. Some even looked freshly mounted bolts
driven into the park that wet, clean sap beneath them.
I packed up camp and made for the truck, ready
to leave this evolving night mare behind, only to find
it wasn't where I left it. The tire tracks stretched
off into the brush and vanished without a sign of
turning around. I stood there for a long while, fighting
the urge to just walk back to town and leave
it all behind. But the job was half way done.
Rent wasn't going to pay itself, and I couldn't stomach
another mistake on my record. I just needed to finish
off the last of my assigned route, so I kept going.
I was going to finish clearing these trails. Nothing in
those woods connected the way it should. Paths I knew
for a fact ran east to west began curving in
on themselves, leading me back to places I hadn't passed. Twice.
I checked my compass until the needle spun in slow,
lazy circles. No matter which way I turned the GPS,
my phone glitched between aero screens and coordinates that made
no sense. I started leaving fresh markers behind me, bright
tape scratches in the bark, small cairns of stone. Every
time I circled back, they were gone. The discarded pile
of signs I created the disposal later that morning vanished too.
I kept walking until the trees opened into a clearing
I didn't remember from any map, and its center stood
a structure, not natural, not accidental, a totem of old
signs rusted and rotted, deliberately bolted together in twisting layers.
Beneath the plaques hung scraps of fabric, torn backpacks and
empty shoes, bones which between them yellowed thin with age.
I recognized a few of the names on those signs
from the markers. I pulled names from my paperwork, names
from missing persons cases decades old. The trees around the
clearing weren't untouched either, deep grooves cut into the bark,
long slashes that pulled at the wood in crude shapes.
At first they looked random, for the longer eyes stared,
the more they resembled the clean square fonts used on
county trail markers. Letters, half formed, sentences, left unfinished. This
wasn't some prank. This wasn't locals trying to scare me off,
or some bitter old men with a Cbee radio in
the woods. The trails weren't just abandoned. They weren't meant
to be touched. The woods were watching, or worse, waiting.
I tried to backtrack. I tried to follow the map,
my own markers, even the sun. None of it lined
up anymore. In the end, I went back to the clearing,
back to the totem. I thought if I burned it,
maybe it would break whatever was holding me here. Maybe
fire would undo it. Strip it down to something human again.
The flames caught easily enough, but they burned blue green
at the edges, curling smoke up in heavy spirals that
didn't rise, but hung low and thick over the ground.
That was when the woods reacted. The wind roared through
the trees and sharp burst, pulling at the branches until
they bowed and twisted. The ground trembled beneath my feet.
I heard something creak in the dark beyond the clearing timber, straining, metal,
grinding against itself. The totem didn't burn, not really. The
signs blackened, peeled, fell apart, only to pull themselves together again,
bent metal, reformed, plaques, twisting into new shapes, names, rearranging
themselves into words. I couldn't read. The whole thing shifted taller, now,
branches splitting off its core like limbs. Something stepped free
of it. I couldn't tell whether the structure ended and
the thing began. Wood for bones, rusted, signs for skin, nailed,
plaques overlapping like scales, limbs too long, torso hollowed out
a shape made of all the pieces I thought I
had removed. Signs hung from its body, clattering against each
other with every slow, deliberate movement, words I recognized, names,
I had touched, dates I had logged. It didn't speak,
it didn't need to. The weight of its gaze pressed
into me, pulling something loose behind my eyes. Branches scraping
against one another until they sounded almost like laughter, Dry
and joyless. I turned to run, but there was nowhere
left to go. Paths folded in on themselves. Roots broke
through the dirt in coils thick enough to trip me
no matter which way I turned. Daylight snapped the dusk
without warning, Shadows stretching long and thin until they swallowed
the edges of the clearing. The thing watched me until
I couldn't hold on to the moment any longer. The
ground tilted, the air split sideways, My thoughts scattered into static.
I blacked out, standing right where it wanted me. I
woke up lying in the dirt, but it wasn't the
same dirt I'd blacked out on the ground beneath me
was clean, the trail well made, fresh gravel crunched under
my hands. When I pushed myself upright, the trees weren't
dead and twisting anymore. They stood tall and green leaves
shifting gently in a breeze that actually smelled right. I
could hear birds again, wind in the branches. For a moment,
I let myself believe I'd made it out. Maybe i'd
wandered too far, passed out, and someone had dragged me
back to a safe route. But my truck was gone.
No sign of my tent, my tools, the clearing or
twisted thing i'd seen, pullets off together from bones and metal.
I turned in a slow circle, trying to find any
marker to orient myself. Nothing. Only a trail running ahead
in behind, so neat and addly it might have been
laid down yesterday. I followed it backward, hoping it might
lead to a road. Instead, it brought me to a sign, new,
freshly bolted, standing proud at the trailhead. The words didn't
make sense until I read them twice. It was a
new trail, one I hadn't seen when I took inventory
of the listed trails for the area named after me.
The established date was the day I had blacked out.
There was no way someone could have made a whole
trail in that shorter time. It would have taken a
whole team weeks. Yet, here it was freshly laid and
ready for use. I stood there, staring until my throat
closed up. The font matched every sign I'd removed over
the past week, same materials, same even the angle of
the placement was the same as the ones I'd pulled
down with my own hands. I remembered clear as daylight,
how every one of those old trails bore the name
of a missing person. Names I thought would just bureaucratic
leftovers from decades past, memorials to those lost to nature,
forgotten names. I had thought I was helping a raise,
but I wasn't clearing them. I was making room. This
was how new trails got built, not laid by county workers,
not signed off with permits or blueprints. People didn't vanish here,
they got repurposed. I kept walking because I didn't know
what else to do. The trails stretched ahead, perfect and
clean beneath my feet. No rot no traps, no no
wrong turns, just a neat little path inviting people in.
Up ahead, I saw them hikers, three of them, maybe four,
bright jackets, backpacks, chatting as they made their way down
the trail like nothing was wrong, laughing, relaxed, without a
clue what waited further in. I shouted for them to stop.
I waved my arms, stepped into their path, anything to
get their attention. They didn't react, they didn't even glance up.
I screamed at them, begged them to turn around, told
them they had no idea what they were walking toward,
that this trail wasn't meant to exist, that it would
swallow them like it swallowed me. They walked through me,
not around, not past through. Cold sliced through my ribs
and chairs, a chill deeper than winter, leaving nothing behind
but air. They didn't hesitate, didn't seem to notice at all.
I chased after them, still shouting, still trying to get
between them and the woods ahead. No matter what I did,
they didn't hear my words, didn't touch them. My hands
couldn't stop them. I stepped off the trail, hoping maybe
that would break whatever held me here. The world twisted,
trees folded inward, colors drained to ash and bone. I
blinked and found myself back on the path where I
had started. I tried again, same result. Every time, the
trail wouldn't let me leave. I could only watch as
the hikers moved ahead, until they left the confines of
where my limits were, unaware that deeper in, something was
possibly waiting to fold them into the earth the same
way it folded me. I wanted to follow them, make
sure they were safe, but I couldn't even touch them.
All I could do was watch, helpless, voiceless, bound to
this path. Time stopped making sense after a while. I
didn't eat, I didn't sleep, I didn't even get tired.
My body didn't ache, my feet never blistered. But I
couldn't leave the trail. I tried every direction, every hour
of what I could only guess was passing time. Off
the trail, the world broke apart and threw me back
on to the gravel. I couldn't rest. I just walked
back and forth from the trailhead bearing my name, to
the furthest point before the woods bent the world in half. Again,
back and forth forever. People came, not often, but enough,
hikers and pears, or groups wandering in without a clue,
following my name printed on that clean, fresh sign. I
followed them at a distance, watched them finish the path,
heard them laugh about the beautiful scenery, the quiet woods.
They always made it through at least the ones I saw.
They always left. I couldn't follow beyond the trailhead. I
wanted to think I was watching over them. Some part
of me still wanted to protect someone from this place.
I told myself, maybe that mattered, Maybe I still mattered.
Then came the ranger, a county man, clipboard in hand,
maintenance vest, same patch and his sleeve I used to wear,
same paperwork. I'd filled out, the checklist, the inventory, same job.
He stood beneath my sign for a long time, scowling
at it. Eventually he pulled out a crowbar and started
prying it loose. I wanted to scream at him to stop,
to leave it, to get back in his truck and
drive until he couldn't see trees anymore. I followed him
as he walked down the trail, dragging the sign under
one arm. I screamed as loud as I could, then
pushed harder to try to get through to him. Nothing
happened until his radio crackled at his hip. My voice
came through. It walked and broken, barely words at all,
a handful of syllables, a warning he couldn't hear, or
maybe he could, and simply dismissed it. As the locals
driving him away, ahead of him between the trees. I
saw it, the thing from the clearing, the shapes stitched
together from rusted signs, and bones from wood and stolen names.
They moved ahead of him, slow but certain, always just
out of sight. It wasn't chasing him, it didn't have to.
It was leading him somewhere. He didn't see it. He
wouldn't have believed it if he did. He followed his paperwork,
his duty, not knowing what was waiting for him. Now
that he had disturbed the trail. They stepped off the
trail together, into the woods, beyond where I could go.
I stood there, watching the space where they vanished, listening
to the empty woods breathe. The sign would come back.
I knew, new name, new date, new path carved deeper,
another piece added to the forest's collection, another mile for
hikers to follow. Another man swallowed up, and I couldn't
do a damned thing to stop it.