Static.
Harry had used the range extender, had climbed to the highest point on Mount Timpo, but the old hand radio spewed out a thick stream of that same computer hiss. He exhaled, half sigh, half grunt, as the day’s labors gripped his lungs on descent. He let himself off the tree delicately, only half worried he might have gotten frozen to the dying bark and let it bend itself back upright.
The summit of the 12er he had called home for the last three months shone in the moonlight. Most nights, the trees were just black serpents in a vat of oil, but the fresh snowfall and full moon lit the ground like a negative of the sky above. The stars peaked out through holes in the inky black of the night sky as the trees and underbrush swallowed the dusty blue of the moonglow in pinpricks on the eastern slope. Someone looking at a photo of the landscape would probably call it beautiful. Someone looking at a photo probably wouldn’t be standing in negative ten at midnight on New Year’s Eve.
“Tower. Come in. This is Hotel Sierra One. No sign of our hiker.” Harry tried again. Static cut into the excited channel. And then faded back into the silence. “Copy, Harry,” he muttered to himself, in a shrill impersonation of his partner’s voice. “They’re probably dead, come on back and let’s have that drink.” Julia would never say that, of course, but she won the coin flip and got to run the tower when the call came in. Since there were only two available hands, that meant Harry had to go out into the woods in the middle of the night on New Year’s Eve. It was silly, one person in charge, and one person on foot, but the watchtower had a stronger radio, and someone had to man the fort while the manhunt lasted. Harry was used to the cold, too. He had grown up in San Diego, the one in Texas, so he didn’t grow up with it, but he was a big man, and with just under half a dozen layers, the still, frigid air left him well enough alone. He thought about Julia and her petite frame, and couldn’t help but wonder if he would’ve volunteered to go if he had won the coin flip.
The gaiter from his mask drooped and he instantly smelled frozen blood, a reminder that exposure was still a threat even if it only took his nostrils, and he hurried back to the ATV. This was one of the perks of the job, this not quite car that the park rangers get access to. It steered like a motorcycle, but also had doors and heating like a car. The cab sat one comfortably, but technically had three seats. Whenever the two of them had to cut down beetle-killed trees or report on firewatch in the summer, he usually rode crouched in, or rather on the bed of the little vehicle, Julia driving the ancient four-stroke through the bumpy woods. A Montanna native, she knew the Flatheads better than most, and had a better feel for the parts she didn’t know than Harry did. Not that they were all that different from the mountains in Texas. They were just bigger, and snowier.
But he did know protocol. The tower was the next stop before, most likely, the assumed point of incident. Harry kicked the starter and the old machine sputtered back to life before settling into a high idle. Something about the sub zero chill that the internal combustion engine didn’t quite like. He held his hands over the air funneling out of the heating unit, already biting with cold, and allowed himself until they were just mildly numb, before slipping his gloves back on and motoring downhill, into the dark of the moonstarved western slope.
Something glinted in the moonlight, the odd sight at the edge of the moonlit grove catching his eye and drawing him in like a moth to a flame. Maybe seven feet up, a crisscross slashing was etched into one of the pine trees. The layers of a vicious X shone brightly, what would be honey colored naked wood in the sunlight, now a dull gray, stood in stark contrast to the weathered bark that surrounded it, clinging desperately to the patches where an obviously sharp instrument had lacerated the softer flesh of the conifer. It was way too late in the winter for bears, but Harry made a note of its general shape and location before slipping into the shadow and out of the moonlight.
The trail, if you could call it that, back to the tower proved challenging, even to a reasonably seasoned ranger, in the summer. Now, it was borderline treacherous. Luckily, the snow hadn’t fallen for several days. The freeze-thaw cycle of the sunlight on the sub zero landscape had melted and frozen the top layer of the thick snow into a glassy ice, and anywhere it was disturbed, at least on the western slope, the winds picked up the snowpack and redeposited it any and everywhere else. To avoid accidentally covering his own tracks, Harry drove just uphill of a clearing. He weaved in between the ancient trunks of the taller trees, guaranteeing at least half his tracks wouldn’t be swept up by the winds on the way up, and followed them back down easily enough. Or so he thought.
He swore as the back tires lost traction and he slammed against a particularly gnarled trunk. The loud thud on top of the roof told him that the tree had made a generous deposit of snow that was previously stored in its branches. The whistling in his left ear told him that the window hadn’t survived the impact. Looking out, it appeared that neither had the side mirror. He revved the engine and found the assembly free, but in a free spin downhill, into the clearing. Squeezing the clutch and steering into the endless left turns brought him from a death spiral into a hectic fishtail, and from a hectic fishtail into stable descent, pulled forward only by gravity.
Harry let off the clutch and allowed the engine to pull him forward, on a course slightly uphill of parallel with the slope. He could barely see the valley where he would have to cut back east to head to the tower, but the wind rushing in reminded him that a speedy ascent could end the journey altogether. As he solidified in the current course, he thought about the call that had brought him out into the woods. A stargazer in town had called 911 after seeing a man wandering through the forest at around 11pm, approximately halfway up the twelve thousand feet to the peak, in the clearing that Harry was now half riding, half sliding through. Of course, there weren’t any footprints or signs of passage in the clearing, but the caller may have gotten the location wrong. Harry looked back at the tiny diamond necklace that the call must have come from. He had a telescope too, but he had never looked at anything other than the stars with it while he was off duty. He wondered if some stranger, twenty or so miles away was looking at him now. He decided that he didn’t like the idea, and looked back towards the valley that was now quickly approaching him.
The ATV took the turn clumsily, and Harry thanked his lucky stars when it miraculously righted itself before he might have rolled over into another tree. The things were easy enough to knock over, especially the ones that had died due to drought or beetles, but he was pretty sure his skull would give before even the weakest of the future logs of a prescribed fire. They would probably need to do one of those in the coming summer. That was one of the least enjoyable parts of this job, working with the forestry service to cut down several dozen if not hundred trees in a neat line and burning the rest that laid in the area outlined boundary. Not that there was anything wrong with the boys in the forestry service. They were pleasant enough company, and honestly, they did most of the cutting anyway, climbing up on the taller trees near buildings or critical infrastructure to prevent the trees from falling and damaging whatever poor house or power line lounged downhill of it.
“Too bad they aren’t bears.” Harry joked to himself. He thought back to the territory marking he had seen at the top of Mount Timpo. The beast that had made it had cut with such fervor that it left part of itself on that tree. Little specks of blood were splattered on the bright wood uncovered in the slashing, and ran down the tree in little streams of frozen rubies like it itself was bleeding. It was impossible to tell how long ago it had happened due to the freeze, only that it had to have been within the last three weeks, as the temperature had risen just barely above freezing before the plunge into December had beaten it down. Harry wondered why such an animal would attack a tree with such fervor, with such abandon, such disregard for its own flesh, just to make an incision in a dying tree that says “I was here.”
The ATV lurched forward, almost in surprise, as the hand radio crackled to life. “Hotel Sierra One-” Julia’s voice barely carried the callsign across the mountainside before being immersed with static again. “Harry-!” Something was wrong. She never used his name over the radio. He twisted the throttle and the rangermobile sped towards the watchtower. Whether it was his weight or the weather, he couldn’t get there fast enough.
The watchtower stood alone against the snowy background, like a water tower that someone had abandoned long ago, creaking and tapping gently in the wind. Harry was at the steps before his vehicle stopped moving. He had cleared three flights and was halfway up before he realized the tapping he had heard was the front door to the watchtower, clapping lazily against the wall before it could close, bouncing against the wood and the wind. He had definitely locked it when he left. And it wasn’t supposed to open that far. Someone, or something had pulled the doorstop out of the deck.
“Julia!” Harry screamed into now dark cabin. He could barely hear himself over the drumming pulse in his ears. “Hey! Where are you? What-” He stopped himself from asking what happened. He could barely breathe. He clicked on his flashlight and wheeled it around the living space/office, finding papers, blankets and canned goods wildly scattered about the combination living room/dispatch. The tower radio’s handpiece swung despondently from the counter in the disarray. Harry flipped up the couch and turned over his partner’s room looking for any sign of the woman, to no avail. He almost didn’t look in his. When he did, his blood ran cold.
His room was waylaid more than any of the previous three, by far; his mattress had been shredded, picture frames lay amid broken glass and splintered floorboards. Perhaps it was due to the gale rushing in through the broken window. But the room had an eerie stillness around the tenantless frame. No broken furniture or torn floorboards. Just his telescope. He knew he should keep looking for Julia, but he was drawn to the instrument of astronomy.
The telescope was usually neatly packed away, but now it was ready for use, its oils and lens caps gingerly laid at its side, despite the wicked shatter in the window. He looked through it. It was wildly out of focus, but as he adjusted it, the observatory in town just barely came into view. Harry was pissed off now. But there was something odd about what he was looking at. There was a black smudge in the center of the view. He adjusted the camera again, to find his lefthand side mirror, hanging from a branch outside his window. It turned slowly in the wind, and after what felt like an eternity, he could make out two things. A crude drawing of what appeared to be a very tall man, with long fingers and two tiny white eyes, etched into on the mirror. And the caption, commonly seen on all side mirrors, which had been underlined by a shaky hand. “Objects seen in the mirror are closer than they appear.” Even in his rising panic, he could tell the perspective indicated that the tall man was about 9 feet when stood next to the observatory.
Harry burst out of his room and made a beeline for the gun safe. He swore as his freezing fingers fumbled the combination twice, but on the third time, he forced the cold and the panic out of his shaking hands and surgically entered his partner’s birthday, 05, 17, 89, and the latch clicked. Harry could feel his heart drop as the door swung open. Somehow, it was empty. He didn’t stop the vomit as it surged up within him, and he didn’t bother cleaning it from the ravaged ranger station as he stumbled back outside. Leaving the tower, he finally saw the footprints for this poor hiker, trailing away into the woods. Only he knew, he knew before he made another lap down around the shrieking wooden stairs to get visual confirmation. He knew. That they weren’t going into the woods. The awkward gaited, crescent shaped, and monstrously huge tracks, they were heading towards the watchtower.
As rounded the final flight to the ground level, he realized many more things. The ATV wasn’t slowed down by the weather. It didn’t catch itself when it almost flipped coming up the valley. The thing that made the marks at the summit of Mount Timpo wasn’t a bear. And no snow had fallen on top of the ATV this night.
Whatever was on top of the ranger’s vehicle didn’t look cruel or ferocious. It was simply enormous. Its beady, white eyes shown with moonlight, and when it moved to stand, its long spindly limbs pushed the cart over with comical ease. Nine feet tall was a joke, and worst of all, Harry could see through its mouth when it spoke.
“Oh, Harold, you’ve found us.” The thing smiled. “Happy New Year.”
