This is part of a series.
Part 1 can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/zdrmav/my_experience_in_the_death_cap_mountains_part_1/
Part 2 can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/zequ0o/my_experiences_in_the_death_cap_mountains_part_2/
I awoke after a few hours to find Max and Naomi standing over me. The air felt chilly. I looked around quickly and saw we were still in the backroom of the visitor’s center, the door propped open to allow a view of the front sliding glass door. Nothing seemed amiss though someone had certainly cleaned up. The floor even looked swept and mopped.
“What time is it?” I asked in a gruff voice.
“Seven AM,” Max answered. I looked out the glass door in front in surprise.
“Then why is it pitch black out?” They looked at each other and shrugged.
I got up, my back cracking. I felt wiped out and sore. I felt cold and uncomfortable. Most of all, I wanted to go back home and be done with this whole ordeal. My curiosity had been sated, forever.
“Alright, let’s do what we are going to do,” Naomi said, motioning with her head towards my little Toyota. “We still have a nearly full tank thank God. I am not feeling in the mood to walk 70.9 miles or more.”
We crammed into the car, Naomi driving, me in the passenger seat and Max in the back. We all had our guns out, but for a while the road was clear. I felt watched but saw nothing except the occasional glittering of eyes from the forest. A few times a fox or a few deer would run out in front of the car and Naomi would slam on the brakes and let them pass. Still, the sun did not rise.
Because the dirt road had so many potholes and branches on it, the going was relatively slow. After a couple hours of traveling at fifteen or twenty miles an hour, we pulled over for some food. There was a small dirt turnaround on the side that we slid into before turning off the headlights and engine. At first all we heard was the clicks and pings of the cooling engine.
Far off behind us we heard more of those screams from the monstrosities we had first encountered, which were soon after answered by a chorus of others scattered in all different directions. Max passed out peanut butter crackers and bottled sweet tea from the supplies in the back seat and, for a while, we all ate in silence.
“How far have you gone up this road, Max?” Naomi asked. Her sudden words caused me to jump in the dark and slightly tighten my finger around the trigger. Thankfully the safety was on and there was no risk of blowing out the windshield or shooting through the engine.
“I’ve gone up a little farther than this,” he said quietly. “There should be a few cabins coming up on the left, all painted a dark red. This trip with you two has been much easier than the ones I made on my own… knock on wood. Maybe there is power in numbers after all.”
After we finished eating, we continued driving slowly on. Sure enough, after another twenty minutes or so, the headlights illuminated a dark red cabin on the left, the screen door left open and flapping in the light wind. Farther off in the woods behind it we saw another cabin with the windows smashed out, a dead generator behind it. Another fifty feet ahead was the final one of the lot, a cabin that had burned down and only left behind a blackened skeleton of itself.
“That wasn’t like that before,” he said, pointing to the burned out shell of a cabin. I shook my head.
“Doesn’t matter. We aren’t staying here anyway,” I said. But Naomi stopped the car and flipped off the headlights.
“What about those generators?” she asked.
“What about them?” I asked.
“They could have gasoline,” she said.
“Or they could have propane,” Max said. “How much do you even know about generators? I don’t think most run on gas.”
“We need to look, just in case,” Naomi said. “If they have gas or if there are gas containers anywhere around here then we need to grab every drop. We don’t know how long our current supply will last.” I sighed, turned the safety off on my gun and motioned for her to get out.
We all left the car at the same time, our guns at the ready. The breeze felt warm, as if the further we went down the road, the more we left behind our cold New England climate.
Behind the cabins, we heard chanting, perfectly in unison. As soon as I heard them, a hot breeze began to blow, making my eyes water. It drove away the chill in my bones instantly, and within a few seconds I started to sweat, my heart racing as the chanting grew faster. I looked from Max to Naomi, and saw they felt it too. Their eyes widened and sweat began to pop out on their foreheads and cheeks.
“You got your game face on?” I asked Max, the most experienced shooter among us. He nodded.
“Turn your safeties off if they are on and be ready to shoot for center mass,” he said. He motioned for us to hide behind the nearest cabin. That was all the time we had before we saw a line of people come from behind the burnt cabin.
At first I thought we were seeing Buddhist monks. They had the same shaved heads and downcast eyes. They all wore identical robes, but instead of the orange hue of Buddhism, these robes were jet black. The language they chanted sounded like Sanskrit.
A dozen of them huddled in front of the burnt cabin, with a thirteenth bringing a naked woman. She was bound, blindfolded and gagged, with signs of torture all over her body. Someone had carved occult symbols into her belly and legs, and drops of blood still pooled and fell beneath her as she writhed on the deer hide stretcher that he dragged behind him. He laid her in the center of the circle, and they all moved their sandaled feet closer to her until they stood mere inches away. The chanting grew louder and her eyes grew wider. Then they moved back rapidly, moving their heads back and forward in a rhythmic motion in the direction of the burnt cabin. The chanting quieted as a horrific being rose out of the ruins of the fire.
It looked as if he took pieces of himself from the ruins. His skin was the texture of charred wood, his joints had rusty nails and he screeched an inhumanly loud cry as he ripped away from the burnt out cabin. The remains of the cabin all immediately fell into a heap. The creature’s eyes looked like orbs of burning red fire as he stood ten feet tall, looking down at all the quiet faces of the downcast monks before his attention focused on the naked woman.
At that moment, I felt a gentle tap on my arm. It was Naomi. She leant close to my ear and whispered, “Screw looking for more fuel, we need to get out of here- now.” She pointed to the car. Luckily the cabins and trees had obscured the view of the car from the monks but we couldn’t count on that continuing indefinitely.
“Wait a few seconds,” I said. “I think we need to see this.”
The creature knelt down to the bound woman. I could see her widening eyes and her thrashing but they had bound her too tight. It opened its mouth wide, a cavernous abyss, and began to scream mere inches from her face.
The torrent of echoing noise made me clasp my ears in pain, but I continued to watch in terror as the wall of sound began to rip at the woman’s skin. It tore off her gag and bindings, then her hair and eyes followed. But as her healthy pink skin tore away, it was replaced by the marble white paleness of the monstrosities we had encountered first. New cataract-stricken milky eyes emerged from the ruins of her former human eyes. Simultaneously, her mouth ripped from ear to ear in a terrifying smile. Hundreds of crooked teeth seemed to grow from her gums as she gnashed at her tongue, finally chewing it off and spitting it on the ground in a bloody heap. In this entire transformation, the black-clad monks never moved but simply stared, impassive.
Rising from her spot on the ground, she began walking on all fours, crab-walking backwards. Her joints cracked and her tendons creaked as her black hair dragged on the leaves behind her. Then she scurried off into the woods, towards the direction we had come.
“Another guard for the sacred forest,” the tallest monk said, stepping forward. His bronze skin reflected the moonlight as he stared up at the creature.
“Jason,” Max whispered in my ear, “we need to go RIGHT NOW.” I nodded and we began to silently slink back to the car, keeping the cabins between us and the monks as much as possible. None raised the alarm as we reached the car and very gently closed the doors, trying to avoid slamming them. Naomi started the engine. I held my breath, praying no one would hear the doors close or the engine start.
My prayers apparently failed, because a few moments later, the red-eyed monster came sprinting out from between the three cabins, looking frantically around before seeing our car and galloping towards us. Naomi hit the gas and the car jumped forward. Max sat in the back seat, holding his AR-15 on the back seat covers so he could begin filling the creature with bullets if it came too close.
At first it gained on us, even with the accelerator pressed all the way down. The car hit a massive pothole and Naomi instinctively braked and swerved, allowing the charred arm of the creature to come down and rake the back windshield. It exploded inwards, peppering Max with safety glass. Max fired rapidly out the back window. I saw the long arm of the creature explode as it reached towards us, then its fiery red eyes fell into a hundred pieces as a bullet caught it directly in the middle of its head. The rest of its body immediately started decomposing, thousands of pieces of small ash and larger charred wood being blown in the wind until it disappeared like a disintegrating mirage.
“Oh my God,” I said, breathless, “that was a close one.” Max looked forward at me, still as cool as a cucumber, without a drop of sweat on his forehead. “Don’t you ever get frazzled, Max?” I asked.
“I’ve seen a lot in my time as an agent,” he said. “It takes a lot to rattle me.”
“Well, we didn’t get any more fuel,” Naomi said, “but I think we learned something integral back there. Apparently there are people here raising at least some of these creatures. Maybe some sort of cultists.”
“But how did they get here? And how do they not get ripped apart by the monsters in these forests?” I asked. Naomi shrugged.
“If I had to guess, maybe they have some sort of sigil or marker. And they sounded like they were speaking in some sort of ancient Indian language, maybe Pali or Sanskrit, or perhaps another proto-Aryan dialect. That could indicate that they are following something ancient, as those were the ancient sources for most of the chants in Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. If these monks are some sort of schism that practices sacrifices or raises demons, then they could be thousands of years old.” Naomi shrugged. “Unless we can talk to one of them, I doubt we will ever know for sure.”
“I have a feeling we will end up seeing them again,” I said. “Whatever evil they’re doing here must be a part of this road.”
We continued driving in silence for a while. My hammering heart started to slow down after a few minutes, and with the adrenaline out of my system I began to feel tired. It felt like I had been here for weeks instead of just a night. Checking my phone, I saw it was already 9 in the morning, and still the sun had not risen.
We pulled over for a break to use the bathroom, or what passed for it with only trees and bushes around. The moon was full but had a reddish-orange hue covering it, similar to what I had seen in lunar eclipses.
The car continued plodding along slowly, going twenty miles an hour past the constant potholes and the swaying trees and bushes on both sides. Occasionally I would see silver eyes staring out from between the bushes, sometimes they looked like they were on silhouettes that were fifteen feet tall. I didn’t know what was out there in the dark and didn’t want to know. So we just kept on driving and talking, none of us wanting to think about what would happen when we inevitably ran out of fuel. The tank was, after all, already seven-eighths empty, and I doubted we would find any gas stations on this road. When the car stopped, we would have to continue on foot. But to what? What were the Death Cap Mountains, and could we get back to the regular towns we knew from there?
As we drove on, clearings opened up the view. Many miles in the distance I could see the silhouette of dark mountains that stood high overhead. There was also what appeared to be a radio or phone tower not far away. My phone had no service but as we drew near, a weak wireless internet network appeared on my phone under the name “Emergency services 772”. After fifteen minutes we saw it next to the road, with a dirt turnaround in front of it. It had stairs going up in a helix on the edge of the tower. The wifi was too weak to get a connection down in the car.
“I want to go up the tower,” I said. “Maybe we could see further down the road, and hopefully even get some internet. I want to write an account of what we have seen in case we never make it home. Seeing as the visitor’s center could connect to the internet from the real world, I think the wireless connection here might be able to also.” Max consented with a grunt, but Naomi seemed unsure.
“Is it really worth it? And even if we do contact people on the other side of the barrier, what if it just encourages someone to come looking for this road? We could be responsible for their death,” Naomi said.
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe that’s why they leave internet connections throughout the path. It could just be a way to trap new people who think this is just some fake story.” I frowned. “But we have to try. If even one person could be warned away, we have to try.” With that, I got out of the car and approached the metal staircase. I heard Max and Naomi follow me.
The stairs seemed to rise fifteen stories in the air, a circular pattern that hugged the three thick metal poles that rose into the air. Looking down, I could see all the way to the bottom through the metal vents that composed the staircase. It did not inspire confidence. Every time I looked down, my stomach would flip and a shot of adrenaline would reach out to the very tips of my fingers and toes. I had never liked heights.
There was a thin steel banister that ran on the inner dimension of the stairs, and I gripped it the entire way up until my knuckles were white. I counted the steps to take my mind off the height, but lost count after around 1700 stairs. This was, by far, the highest tower I had ever been on.
Nevertheless, we ended up getting to the top without any issue. I checked my phone and, to my relief, I did have full wifi access now. But the light from my phone illuminated something far less cheerful across the observation deck.
Ten black, twisted fingers held to the side of the deck, as if someone was hanging by the tips of their fingers there, fifteen stories in the air. My heart leapt into my throat as I realized that whoever was there must have been hanging since at least before I got there.
“Hello?” I asked, drawing nearer. There was no response, not even a breath or a sigh. As I drew closer, I saw the nails were long, twisted and sickly-looking. They looked like they had dried blood and dirt shoved underneath them, debris which had festered for months into a black goo.
Something in my gut told me to avoid the fingers. I went ten feet to the right, as wide a berth as I could give them, and looked over the railing to the thing hanging below. With a glance back, I saw that both Max and Naomi had stopped at the top step, sensing danger and refusing to come up to the observation deck with me until they understood what was happening.
The moonlight illuminated the thing’s shiny black skin, which glinted like the carapace of a beetle. Its arms were far too long for a human being, looking more like a chimpanzee in its proportions. Its pure white eyes stared over at me for a moment before it shrieked and began swinging over to me, one hand over the other, and tried to pull me over the side. I fell back with a cry as its fingers swiped the air mere centimeters in front of my shirt. If it had grabbed me, I know without a doubt I would be dead.
I fell down to the observation deck, looking through the metal grating down fifteen stories and feeling like I would vomit from terror at any moment. Thankfully at that moment, Max ascended the last step and took aim with his rifle. He hit the creature directly in the center of its chest, sending it flying backwards. Four or five seconds later, I heard a heavy thud as it slammed into the hard dirt and rocks below.
I tried to get back to my feet but first, I threw up through the metal vents. My heart was beating so fast that I thought it would explode. I focused on my breathing and slowly calmed myself down.
Naomi had brought up some water and protein bars. We sat and ate and drank in silence as I wrote this up and posted it. In the distance, I could see the massive mountains beckoning me on. From up here, they looked so close that I felt I could jump from here to there with long enough legs. But of course, it was just an optical illusion, as they still had to be at least twenty or thirty miles away.
Continue to Part 4: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1005v9g/i_traveled_on_the_death_cap_mountain_road_and/