“Are you sure about this?” I asked Sean for what seemed like the tenth time in the last two hours we’d been hiking the overgrown trail. The sun was high overhead, filtering through the shady canopy in flares of light as the trees moved with the blowing of the cool breeze. For a late March afternoon, the weather was nearly perfect – crisp and clear, but still warm enough that we’d been able to stow our heavier jackets and trade them out for light windbreakers. “We’ve been walking a while and haven’t seen anything yet.”
Sean paused a moment ahead of me, scratching idly at his leg while he checked his GPS.
“Yeah, we’re almost there. Just a little further,” he said with a knowing grin. He knew that I hadn’t been as keen as he was about going off-plan for his little side-excursion, but I also knew there was no way I was going to be able to dissuade him. He had that same look in his eyes that he always got when he’d set his mind to something. “I took a bearing when I saw it and we’ve been staying on course. Shouldn’t be much longer. We’ve been going uphill for a while now and the trees are starting to thin a bit. We should be close.”
We’d been hiking through Glacier National Park on our annual outing, a tradition we’d kept every year since we left college and went our separate ways. In that time, I married and started a family and Sean continued the whole bohemian wanderlust thing he’d been drawn toward for as long as we’d known each other. Every month or two, he’d send me a postcard from some new exotic location he’d visited, and I’d been keeping tabs on his adventures via his social media posts. Two months prior, he’d hiked through Nepal and visited Everest base camp, while I stood in a cramped conference center amidst an insipid sea of other boring, monochrome, colleagues at yet another in an endless line of pointless trade shows. Our connection was slowly but surely fading, though. As he spent his days drifting from place to place, picking up whatever odd jobs he could to supplement his income, I was focused on my family and the white-collar career that I’d built to provide for them.
Aside from our yearly gathering and the few sporadic phone calls scattered around the holidays, we were slowly drifting apart. It was sad to think about losing that connection with someone who’d been your best friend since elementary school, but I supposed it was inevitable – just the way of things.
Because of this, I was always more tolerant of Sean’s flights of fancy when we were together, despite the fact that they often ran in opposition with my own, more conservative, inclinations. So, when we’d been hiking atop the ridgeline earlier that morning and Sean suddenly stopped and pointed out the odd structure protruding through the trees on the hill opposite us, I hadn’t offered much resistance.
It was difficult to tell without binoculars from that distance, but Sean was insistent that it looked like an old fire lookout tower. I was less certain, but my eyesight wasn’t as good as his, and it definitely seemed like the right shape. We weren’t in fire season, and as I understood it, the towers weren’t manned during this time of year. Hell, I’d even read that some states would rent them out to people as unique weekend vacation rentals.
I always thought that sounded like an interesting idea and had even floated it past Cheryl a couple of times as a romantic getaway concept, knowing full-well that there was little chance she’d be interested in the idea. She was more of a “weekend at a cottage on the beach” kind of woman, though, and never took much of a shine to the idea, so I’d given up on it.
Admittedly, my interest was piqued when Sean drew my attention to the tower, and even more so when he spied what looked like an old dirt path that wandered through the shallow and forested basin separating us from it. It hadn’t taken much convincing to get me to follow along behind him as we left the main trail and started the winding descent. Truth-be-told, I was enjoying this little adventure, enjoying the feeling of rebelling against my routine-oriented instincts.
When we were abruptly stopped by the chain-link fence that stretched forebodingly across the trail, that little voice in the back of my head was chanting a very distinct, “I told you so”, mantra. Old and worn “No Trespassing” signs were prominently displayed along the fence line every thirty or forty feet, the paint faded and illegible in places. You could just make out the official seal of some government office, but it was impossible to identify which. I supposed it was probably the parks service or something like that.
“Huh,” said Sean, hands on his hips as he stood before the eight-foot-tall fence, topped with barbed wire. “That’s weird. Why would anyone go through the effort of putting up a fence here?”
I moved to stand next to him, noting how the fence ran to our right and left, lost quickly from sight to the dense trees that surrounded the narrow trail.
“They probably don’t want anyone trespassing on the tower,” I offered, wondering myself at the unexpected placement of the barrier.
“Nah, that doesn’t make any sense,” he said with an absent shake of his head, not taking his eyes off the fence. “They’d just put one around the base of the tower. I’ve seen those before. This looks like the whole area is cordoned off.”
I stood there another moment, silently agreeing with his assertion. It was a mystery, but not one I was overly interested in getting to the bottom of. Finally, with a quick glance to the sunlight filtering through the trees above, I gave him a quick slap on the shoulder and nodded back the way we’d come. “Regardless, we’d better turn around if we want to make it to the campsite before sundown. I don’t want to be setting up our tents in the dark.”
Sean turned an amused smile to me, and I could see that sparkle of mischief in his eyes, reminding me so much of that little kid who used to always get me in trouble when we were younger. “You’re joking, right? It’s just a chain-link fence, Jim.”
“I’m not climbing over that thing,” I said, shaking my head with a frown. “The last thing we need is for one of us to break an ankle or get cut up on that barbed wire. Nobody even knows where we are; we should be two hours farther along the main trail by now, not bushwacking our way up to another ridge entirely.”
He looked back at the fence thoughtfully, moving forward and leaning his weight against the galvanized steel mesh. There was a good amount of give to it and, after a moment’s consideration, he reached down and grasped the bottom edge, pulling it up from the ground. I saw there was easily enough room for a grown man to army-crawl beneath it and groaned inwardly at what I knew was coming next.
“Come on, Jim. Get your butt under there and hold it for me. We’re almost there – there’s no sense in turning back now,” he goaded with that same mischievous grin.
I gave a resigned sigh, unslung my backpack from my shoulders, and shoved it under the fence, following behind it on the hardpack trail, grimacing at the stones that dug into my elbows and chest as I went.
When I reached the other side, I held the mesh up for my friend and a few moments later, we both stood on the inside, resecuring our backpacks. Sean nodded past me, and I turned to look at the path that continued up the gentle incline. Through the breaks in the trees ahead, I could just make out the straight lines of a manmade structure.
Without another word, we struck off again, Sean in the lead and I following along behind, adjusting my heavy backpack as I went. The air, though still cool and breezy, now seemed to have an odd feeling to it, as if something had changed slightly with our trespassing. The sounds of the forest seemed somehow subdued, and the sunlight didn’t feel quite as penetrating or warm as it made its way through the canopy overhead. As we walked, I wondered if we were going to have to backtrack all the way back to the main trail in order to make for the campsite we’d registered with the ranger station, or if there was perhaps a shortcut we could take from here that would still allow us to reach the site before we lost the light of the day.
Ten minutes later, we emerged from the tree line into a wide and heavily overgrown clearing, underbrush, tall grass, and vines choking the ground as we proceeded, threatening to trip us with each step. In the center of the clearing stood the subject of our quest, the lookout tower.
Rising eighty feet or more above the ground, the timber-framed tower looked old and disused, covered in a blanket of creeper vines and green-gray moss that rose halfway up its height. At the top sat a window-lined shack, surrounded by a narrow walkway with wooden rails that appeared questionable in their integrity, at least from this distance. A metal staircase wound its way around and up the structure, rising higher and higher and ending in what appeared to be a trapdoor in the catwalk far above.
At the base of the tower stood a small cabin, not much larger than the shack that was perched atop the aging structure. A slack electric line swayed loosely in the breeze, running from the tower to what I assumed was a generator housed in a small shed behind the cabin.
The cabin’s door was closed and locked from the outside by a rusty padlock securing an equally rusty latch, though it looked like the hardware had been indifferently affixed to the frame and door with cheap wood screws, and the shackle appeared to be barely hanging onto the doorframe. The windows of the cabin, all still intact, were grimy and coated with a thick layer of greenish mold, giving the strange appearance of some otherworldly frost that had beset them. The roof and walls of the cabin were covered in those same lush green creeper vines that rose partway up the tower, and the whole area gave me the sense that this location had been abandoned for many years.
Despite my initial misgivings, I couldn’t deny the sense of adventure and discovery I now felt, as if we were some early twentieth-century explorers and we’d just discovered an ancient, treasure-filled temple buried in the heart of the Amazon. I grinned as the theme from Raiders floated through my thoughts.
Sean gave a hoot of surprise, and I walked over to where he stood, looking at an old Jeep that had been parked next to the cabin and left to the ravages of nature as it slowly reclaimed the whole area.
“Man, I can’t believe they just left this here,” he said, trying to get a good look at the vehicle. The rusted metal and flat tires made it look like it had been here for fifty years or more, but I recognized the body style as one of the newer generations. I estimated that it couldn’t have been more than five or ten years old, at the most.
“I guess leaving a vehicle out here to the elements really does a number on it before too long,” I said, trying to get a look in through the mold-frosted windshield. Unfortunately, all I could make out were the shadowed silhouettes of the seats within. “Too bad. It was probably pretty nice when it was in good shape.”
“Yeah,” he said, lost in his own observations of the thing. “It must have broken down and they didn’t figure it was worth it to have it dragged out of here.” He pulled out his phone and took pictures of the whole area, no doubt planning to upload them to his popular VLOG, where he documented his adventures, allowing others to live vicariously through them.
He lowered his phone and pressed a few keys, frowning. “Man, service out here really sucks. It’s been up and down all day. You’d think it would be pretty good standing on top of a mountain.”
I chuckled, pulling my attention away from the Jeep and turning it to the lookout tower looming above us. It seemed insanely tall from this position, but it occurred to me that I had no idea exactly how tall most of them were. It’s possible that this one was perfectly average. The wooden structure looked surprisingly intact as it rose high above me, and I marveled at what a pain it must have been to build it out here in such a remote location. The creeper vines covered most of it, intermixed with that stringy moss that gave it a furry appearance. I could see that the moss and vines had reached the walkway at the top, and the moss hung over the border like the frayed edges of an old tablecloth.
Again, I wondered idly how long this thing had sat derelict, forgotten by the agency that had built and manned it. It was almost sad, in a way. It was likely this tower and the cabin nearby had been the home of the ranger stationed here for quite a while. At one point, the whole clearing would have been neatly cut back and maintained, and the tower and cabin kept clear of the encroaching vegetation. It was equally likely that the cabin had also served as a sort of substation for the rangers, where hikers and campers would pass through sometimes and check in or ask directions. Now it sat silently, forgotten and left to die in this sea of trees, long abandoned by those who had built it and kept it company.
A wave of motion swept across the creepers above me, a breeze too high for me to feel sending the ivy-like leaves to move in patterns very reminiscent of ocean waves.
The hollow echo of boots on metal drew my attention, and I looked over to see Sean mounting the blanketed staircase.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He just grinned and waved me over. “Come on, Jim. Let’s take a look upstairs. It’s gotta be a hell of a view.”
Before I could protest, he was climbing the steel-tread stairs, hand lightly gliding atop the tubular railing as he went. With a last look around the clearing, I surrendered to my friend’s enthusiasm and followed him up the stairs that ascended the tower in a squared spiral. Although the voice in the back of my mind warned of the obvious dangers, of decayed timber and rusted metal, it was quickly overridden as I rose above the ground, my footfalls a muted ringing that seemed too loud in the quiet that had, at some point, settled over the forest around us.
Up and up, I climbed, the forest floor falling away below me as we approached the soaring canopy of the old trees. Looking down, I paused a moment, marveling at how small the ranger station seemed now, roughly centered in the broad clearing. I could see the vine-covered jeep on the side of the small building and the generator shack behind it. Turning away, I watched as Sean disappeared around the corner above and ahead of me, continuing his climb. I followed, quickening my pace to join my friend.
We broke free of the treetops a few flights before we reached the catwalk of the lookout shack, and I had to stop again and stand in awe at the view that stretched out in all directions around us. The forests that covered the hills and valleys seemed almost like we were in the middle of some great green sea, surrounded by the frozen crests and troughs of its immense swells. A cool wind found us now and tugged at my hair and nylon windbreaker, trying to chase away the sudden warmth of the midday sunlight that now had an unobstructed path to us.
I looked downward, my eyes following the lines of the tower structure as it dropped away through the trees and into the heavily shadowed forest below. Even though we had only just been there, it felt distant somehow, slightly unsettling and much darker than it had seemed previously. Now that we stood in the afternoon sun, the clearing below was a sharp contrast, lush and alive, but also hidden and in some way, secretive.
“Jim, up here,” called Sean, and I quickly jogged up the last few flights of stairs to join him atop the tower catwalk, where he had dropped his pack and now leaned against the waist-high, wooden railing that bordered it. He was lost in the moment, the sun shining on his face as he gazed with a childlike wonder at the vista stretching out before us. A fleeting moment of unease almost caused me to chastise him for trusting his life with what was probably not the most reliable of structures, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good, so instead I set my own backpack next to his, against the wall of the shack, and stood next to him.
“Man, this is an incredible view,” he said.
I just nodded.
We stood there for another moment before he straightened and walked around the corner of the window-lined shack, looking for the door. I followed, trying to peer through the glass as we went, but that same mold or mildew that we found on the cabin windows below also clouded these, obscuring any detail within.
He found the door and I was mildly surprised to find that the creeper vines and moss had managed to climb this high, out of the shadowed forest to take hold even up here, though they seemed a little grayer and less insistent on their grasp, and I didn’t think they fared very well in the direct sunlight. Even so, they had tangled in the door and Sean had to lean his weight into it and push hard to swing it inward, tearing and snapping the vines away as he did so.
We stepped through the threshold into what felt almost like we were stepping into a greenhouse, much of the interior walls and surfaces having surrendered to encroachment of the vegetation. Along one wall was a small cot, the mattress and sheets torn and decayed and stained green with mold. A small writing desk occupied the opposite wall, and a square wooden table stood sentry in the center of the room, covered in the deteriorated remains of notebooks and loose pages.
The air in the shack was strangely humid and close, and the heavy scents of nature filled my every breath, the calm serenity I often associated with it now oddly absent. The light of the afternoon sun struggled to penetrate the clouded windows and instead cast a greenish tint to even those surfaces not already covered by vegetation. The corner of the room nearest the cot was a tangle of leaves and vines that formed a small mound, likely where the vines received the least amount of direct sunlight and allowed them to flourish.
I became aware that I’d been unconsciously holding my breath for a moment, still standing just inside the doorway, and felt a quiet warning at the back of my mind, an uncomfortable sensation that urged me to leave the tower and get back to the main trail.
It was then that I realized how much time we’d spent in our unplanned exploration, and how the sun had continued its descent towards the western horizon. This early in the year, we probably only had a couple hours of good daylight left, and a quick mental calculation told me that it was unlikely we’d make it to our prearranged campsite before full dark, even if we were fortunate enough to find some sort of shortcut from here. I cursed under my breath, aware that we’d likely be stumbling through the dark on the trail and forced to try to find a suitable area to set camp for the night.
“Okay, Sean, time to go,” I said, stepping back out of the doorway and onto the catwalk. “We need to get back to the main trail, post-haste. As it is, we’re going to be hiking in the dark for a bit.” I walked around and picked up my pack, noting with mild surprise that some of the vines had already managed to attach themselves to it, clinging to the fabric as I pulled it away. I looked through the open trapdoor in the catwalk at the dizzying view to the ground below, the muted greens of the vines obscuring most of the steps and causing them to blend into the background beyond, giving the disquieting illusion that they had somehow vanished, and I was staring at an eighty-foot freefall. It was strange, but I could no longer clearly discern any of the metal steps through the blanket of creepers. Of course, with the light beginning to fade, most of the tower was cast in growing shadows, and I wrote it off as an optical illusion.
“Sean?” I called back over my shoulder. When I didn’t get a reply, I shook my head and ducked back into the doorway, finding my friend standing at the central table and leafing through a notebook he’d found.
He looked up at my arrival, an unreadable expression on his face as he nodded at the handwritten pages. “I found a logbook left by the ranger – check it out. It’s strange, though.”
“Come on, Sean. Take it with you and you can read it later. We need to get going,” I said, not bothering to keep the frustration from edging my tone.
“Hang on a sec, Jim,” he said, turning his attention back to the weathered pages. “These pages are dated from October of last year; this thing is only five months old.”
“That can’t be right. It’s obviously just a mistake,” I said, growing more impatient. “This place has been abandoned for years. Let’s go.”
“Just listen a second,” he snapped, and the insistence in his voice quelled my growing irritation.
When I fell quiet, he started reading aloud.
“October 15th – After two days at my new posting, I am starting to feel a little uncomfortable out here. I can’t really put my finger on it, but it feels like there’s something here with me. It’s like I’m never alone, no matter where I am or what I’m doing. Not sure what to make of it. The weirdest thing is the lack of animal life around here. It’s like they avoid this area for some reason. It’s damned eerie.”
“October 16th – Spent all day cutting back the vines from the tower and station. I’m going to need to see if I can get some sort of herbicide to keep them in check. Last night the generator cut out and I discovered that the filter and carburetor were completely blocked up by the moss. It took me nearly an hour to clear them and get it running again. Nobody told me that most of my duties here would be as a landscaper, or I’d have brought my floppy hat and gardening gloves with me.”
“October 18th – I’m not sure what’s going on. I know I heard some weird rumors about this place before I accepted the posting, but they all sounded like BS to me. Now I’m not so sure. The generator is down again and I’ve decided to stay in the lookout tower tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll need to figure out my next move for sure, but I’m done here. They’ll need to find someone else to man this station. What the hell is going on out here?”
Sean stopped reading and looked up at me, his face a mask of confusion in the slowly waning light of the afternoon.
“What else does it say?” I asked, now very interested in the logbook for some reason.
He looked up at me and shrugged. “Nothing. That’s the last entry. He must have booked it out of here the next day.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But if this ranger was so gung-ho on getting out of here, why did he leave his Jeep? You can’t tell me he decided to just hike out of here.”
A disturbing thought struck me at that moment and my eyes wandered hesitantly to the mound of vegetation in the corner of the room, which I now recognized to be unusually large and strangely formed, as if concealing something.
“You don’t think-,” I said, my words trailing off.
“No way,” Sean said lowly in disbelief, dropping the logbook to the table and moving cautiously to the shadowed corner near the cot, eyes fixed upon the mass of vines and ivy.
“Sean-,” I started, some unarticulated warning creeping into my tone. But I didn’t know what else to say, and the words died in my throat.
He reached the mound and crouched carefully, tilting his head and peering intently into the green shadows, trying to discern any detail within. He looked back at me a moment, as if to reassure himself that I was still there, and then cautiously reached his hand out to clear some of the vines for a better look.
In that moment, I caught a glimpse of khaki peeking through the leaves, and of something bleach-white encased within the cloth.
Bones?
I gasped sharply and took an involuntary step backwards, bumping into the table and knocking the logbook to the floor. Sean jerked his head around at the sudden sound and lost his balance, reaching out reflexively to steady himself.
His hand sank into the pile of vegetation, and he gave a sharp cry of pain. I saw then that the leaves of the vines hid long, evil-looking thorns the length of my fingers and glistening shiny black in the dim light. He cursed and tried to jerk his hand free, but something held him in place.
“Ow! Shit, that hurts!” he hissed, struggling to free himself.
With a sudden rustling movement, the vines had constricted around his wrist tightly, the wire-like lengths snapping like a spring-loaded snare. Once his hand was trapped, they continued tightening until the flesh beneath them abruptly parted, opened as neatly as by any razor blade. Sean howled in pain and fought frantically to disengage himself from the tangle, blood pumping from the terrible wound and staining his yellow windbreaker a nightmare tie-dye of crimson.
Without another thought, I leapt forward and reached for his free hand, to lend my strength to his own and pull him free, but before I reached him, his struggles upset his balance once again and this time he fell headlong into the writhing mass of green and red. In an instant, the vines surged over him, enveloping him down to his shoulders with a sickening hunger.
I drew back in revulsion and fear, my mind not able to process what I was seeing.
That’s when he started screaming.
It was a horrific, blood-curdling shrieking of raw terror and suffering, as he lay face-down in the pile of brutal thorns and vines that now covered his upper body, writhing and legs flailing wildly, oblivious to the awful lacerations he was suffering in the process. Blood now slicked the floorboards beneath him, and his cries were muffled and distant. I could only stand there in mute shock, watching him helplessly as his struggles gradually began to slow and grow weaker.
Not long after, he fell silent and still and didn’t move again.
I don’t know how long I stood there, unblinking, unbelieving.
Alone.
I know that when I did finally gather my senses and turn to flee, I discovered to my horror that the vines had stealthily expanded across the doorway to the shack, blocking my only exit. My only escape.
I sit here now atop the table in the center of the room, only a few feet away from what’s left of my best friend. I’ve tried over and over to get some sort of signal on my phone, but the single bar that periodically appears is elusive and fleeting, never present long enough to make a call for help.
I’m writing this post locally on my phone, hoping that it will automatically transmit when the signal returns.
Those vines have covered the whole floor now and I can see in the light of my cell phone that they’ve started climbing the legs of this table. If it were closer to dawn, I might have more hope – I think these things shrink from the sunlight. But dawn is six hours away, and the vines are getting closer.