Chapter 8: The Support Group

The city was a fortress of his own making. Liam had fled to the densest urban sprawl he could find, a sprawling metropolis where the sky was a permanent smear of grey-orange smog and the only trees were sad, anemic things trapped in concrete pots. He lived in a third-floor walk-up, a cramped apartment where the constant drone of traffic and the wail of distant sirens formed a protective blanket of noise, warding off the terrible, expectant silence he’d known in the forest.

He had become a ghost of his former self. The outdoorsman who once found solace in the rustle of leaves now flinched at the sight of a weed growing through a crack in the pavement. He took winding, illogical routes to the grocery store, avoiding the city’s manicured park as if it were a plague pit. His body, still humming with Blackwood's cursed vitality, was a prison. He didn’t need much sleep, so the nights were endless stretches of staring at the water-stained ceiling, reliving the moment the ground had opened its maw, replaying the sound of the hiker's final, choked scream. The strength in his limbs, the absence of pain, was a constant, mocking reminder of the pact he’d been forced into and had ultimately broken. He was a fugitive, branded by an entity that could whisper through every leaf and blade of grass.

His only contact with the outside world was Dr. Sharma. Their calls were brief and cryptic. He never told her the full story of the whistle or the hiker—the shame was too great, a burning coal in his chest—but she heard the brittle terror in his voice and understood enough. After two weeks of him living like a hermit, she sent him a heavily encrypted email.

Liam, it read. You are not the only one. There are others. What you experienced is classified as an Anomalous Geographic Encounter, or AGE. There is a support network. It is secure. It is anonymous. You will be assigned an observer designation. Listen first. Do not speak until you are ready. The link is below. The password is 'TheGroundRemembers'.

That night, Liam logged on. The forum was stark and minimalist, a black background with plain white text. There were no profile pictures, only usernames: DryDock, StoneWhisper, PathFinder, Nocturne. Dr. Sharma was there, her username a grimly appropriate ‘Cassandra’. A dozen other anonymous handles populated the chat window. A video conference was beginning, their voices altered by software, their faces blacked out squares. Liam was simply Observer_7.

A man with the username ‘DryDock’ spoke first, his digitally altered voice raspy and thin. “It’s the anniversary for me this week. Ten years. The urges are bad again.”

“Urges for what?” a calm voice, ‘Nocturne’, asked.

“To go back,” DryDock said. “Just to stand on the shore. I haven't seen the ocean in a decade. Haven't taken a proper bath. Sinks and showers are all I can manage. Anything bigger… it… it calls to me. I can feel it looking at me through the water.”

Liam felt a chill crawl up his spine. It was the same feeling he’d had staring at the potted plant, the sense of a hostile, alien awareness.

“I was on a charter boat,” DryDock continued, his voice tight with remembered fear. “Fishing with my brothers. We sailed into a fog bank, and the water… it went still. Like glass. And it felt thick, almost solid. The fog wasn't mist, it was… tissue. We were inside something. It took my brother, pulled him right off the deck. Not a shark. There was no splash. He just… sank into the surface like it was gelatin. It let me go, but I carry its… its dampness. If I get too close to any large body of water, I can feel it trying to collect the debt.”

Another voice joined, a woman called ‘StoneWhisper’. “I know the feeling. The calling. For me, it’s the mountains. Not the trees,” she said, a distinction that made Liam’s blood run cold. “The rock itself. The deep stone. I was a geologist. Surveying a new range. My partner and I found a cave that wasn't on any chart. The silence inside was… hungry. It whispered. Not with sound, but in my head. Pressure behind the eyes. It promised knowledge. The history of the world, written in strata. My partner walked deeper into the dark. I ran. Now… I can't be near a hillside. I feel the weight of the stone pressing on me, trying to whisper me back into its embrace. It gave me a perfect sense of direction, a gift so I could always find my way back to it. I have to live in the flattest place I could find.”

A litany of horrors unfolded. A user named ‘PathFinder’ spoke of a forest where the paths rearranged themselves when you weren’t looking, a place that fed on your confusion and despair. ‘Nocturne’ described being trapped in a cavern of absolute, unnatural darkness, a darkness that was a tangible thing, and now he could only sleep with every light in his house blazing.

Each story was different, yet terrifyingly the same. A living, predatory geography. A single survivor, allowed to escape. And a lingering "gift" that was really a leash.

“These places… they brand us,” Cassandra—Dr. Sharma—said, her voice calm and authoritative, cutting through the litany of fear. “They invest a piece of their energy in us. It is a mark of ownership, a homing beacon. For some, it is a way to call you back. For others, it’s a warning to their own kind. But it also allows you to sense them. That paranoia you all feel? It is a survival instinct. You have been prey, and now you can smell the predators.”

Liam’s hand went instinctively to his pocket, his fingers closing around the cold, heavy shape of the silver whistle. His brand. The dinner bell. The thing that marked him as property. His experience wasn’t unique. It was a pattern. Blackwood Creek wasn't a singular nightmare; it was just one of many hungry places that dotted the globe, a network of sentient traps hiding in plain sight.

The sheer, staggering scope of it threatened to overwhelm him. He wasn't just a fugitive from one monstrous park. He was a survivor of a phenomenon, a veteran of a secret, impossible war. The world he had known was a thin, fragile veneer painted over a landscape of ancient, sleeping gods with insatiable appetites. He was not alone in his curse. The dozen black squares on his screen were proof of that. They were a small, terrified fraternity of the damned, huddling together for warmth in the digital dark.

The realization brought no comfort, only a colder, deeper horror. His flight from Blackwood wasn't the end of his story. It was the beginning of his true education. His life was no longer about building a career or escaping debt. It was about survival in a world filled with monsters that looked like mountains and oceans and forests. He was no longer just Liam Thorne, failed park ranger. He was Observer_7, a soldier conscripted into a war he never knew existed.