Chapter 4: The Mimic in the Woods

Chapter 4: The Mimic in the Woods

Sunlight, Leo told himself, was a disinfectant. It was the enemy of shadows, the killer of ghost stories whispered in the dark. The terror he’d felt two nights ago had been a product of isolation, exhaustion, and a forest that played tricks on the mind. The archives, the story of the lost campers—that was just a tragic, unrelated coincidence feeding his paranoia. He had to believe that.

He repeated the mantra as he drove his ranger truck down the rattling gravel road toward the Sector 7 trailhead. The morning sun streamed through the windshield, glinting off the dusty dashboard. It was a perfectly ordinary day. Birds chirped in the trees lining the road, and a deer and her fawn watched him pass with placid curiosity. This was the park he’d signed up for: peaceful, rational, real. The nightmare belonged to the night.

Yet, as he parked the truck and shouldered his daypack, the rationalizations felt thin, like a worn-out blanket offering little warmth against a creeping chill. Silas’s words from the day before echoed in his mind, more persistent than any phantom transmission. “This forest has a long memory, Leo. Some echoes… they don’t fade.” The old ranger hadn’t looked at him, just stared out the station window at the treeline, his face a mask of weary resignation. He hadn't called Leo crazy. That was the most terrifying part.

“Just checking the trail markers,” Leo said aloud to the empty truck, the lie meant for himself. He wasn’t here for trail markers. He was here to confront the ghost, to expose it to the harsh light of day and watch it evaporate. He needed to walk the same path, stand in the same spot, and prove there was nothing there.

He stepped onto the trail, the familiar crunch of his boots a comforting, solid sound. For the first half-mile, his theory held. The forest was alive with the hum of insects and the chatter of squirrels. Sunlight dappled the forest floor, painting shifting patterns on the ferns and moss. He felt the knot of anxiety in his stomach begin to loosen. It was all in his head.

Then he crossed the invisible boundary.

It wasn't a line on a map, but he felt it as surely as a drop in temperature. One moment, a jay was scolding him from a high branch; the next, there was nothing. The insectile hum ceased. The birdsong vanished. The gentle rustle of the wind in the canopy died away as if a switch had been thrown. The forest wasn't just quiet; it was muted. He was walking through a photograph of a forest, a perfect replica devoid of all life and sound. It was the same pressurized, waiting silence from that first night, but now it was bathed in the stark, unforgiving light of morning. The sun offered no sanctuary, only a brighter stage for the nightmare.

His heart began to hammer against his ribs, a frantic, lonely drum in the vacuum. Every snap of a twig under his boots sounded like a gunshot. He pushed onward, his original mission twisting into a grim, fearful pilgrimage. He had to get to the abandoned campground, the place the archives had named ‘Whispering Pines,’ the last known location of the campers from 1988.

He found the rusted, barely-legible sign half-swallowed by ivy. The campground itself was a ruin, a testament to nature’s patient reclamation. Moss grew thick on collapsing picnic tables, and rusted fire rings looked like ancient, forgotten altars. The place felt heavy with neglect and sorrow. He walked through the clearing, his eyes scanning the debris of the past, imagining the families who had once laughed here, their voices long since faded into the silence that now reigned supreme.

That’s when he saw it.

Half-buried in the damp soil and pine needles near the base of a massive redwood lay an object that didn’t belong. It was a glint of black plastic and tarnished chrome. He knelt, his fingers brushing away the dirt. It was a walkie-talkie. An old one, a blocky, heavy thing with a collapsible metal antenna. A Midland, from the look of it. A model that would have been common in the late 80s.

A plastic and metal fossil. The single walkie-talkie mentioned in the report.

His blood ran cold. It couldn't be. Things didn’t just lie here for over thirty years, waiting for him. But there it was. He picked it up. It felt heavy, solid, a relic from a lost time. The battery cover was missing, the inside corroded and filled with dirt. It was a dead thing.

Driven by an impulse he didn't understand, he tried the power dial. The knob was stiff, grinding with grit, but it turned with a dry click.

Nothing. Of course. The batteries would have dissolved into acidic dust decades ago. He felt a wave of foolish relief. It was just a piece of trash, a prop in his self-made horror story.

He was about to toss it aside when his thumb brushed against the push-to-talk button on the side. He pressed it. The plastic creaked, but held.

A sound erupted from the speaker grill, so loud and unexpected in the dead silence that he almost dropped the device. It wasn't a voice, but a familiar, savage roar of static. The same aggressive, clawing noise from his own radio on that first night. It was a hungry sound, possessive and ancient.

His breath hitched. How? There were no batteries. No power source. The laws of physics were screaming in his head, but the evidence in his hand was undeniable. The static was a living thing, and this device was its dormant heart, shocked back to life by his touch.

The static swirled, coalesced, just as it had before. It was shaping itself into a sound, pulling a coherent signal from the chaos. He held the radio with a trembling hand, unable to look away, a man compelled to watch his own execution. He expected to hear the campers’ garbled transmission from the audio file, the final, desperate plea he’d heard in the archives.

But the voice that tore through the static was not a stranger from 1988.

It was his own.

A scream.

It was a sound of pure, unadulterated terror, a ragged, larynx-shredding shriek of someone in absolute agony. It was his voice, but stripped of every nuance, every bit of warmth and reason that made it his. Only the pure, distilled agony remained. It was the sound of a man being torn apart from the inside out, a sound of a mind breaking, a soul being consumed.

He stood frozen in the silent, sunlit clearing, listening to a pre-echo of a horror he hadn't yet lived. His mind reeled, desperately trying to find a foothold. He had never made that sound. He had never felt that kind of fear, that depth of pain. Not in the car crash, not in the darkest moments of his guilt, not even two nights ago when the footsteps were walking in the trees above him.

This was not a recording of his past.

The scream on the radio went on for an impossibly long ten seconds before it was abruptly sliced off, replaced by the hungry, churning static. Then, that too died, and the forest was silent once more.

Leo stared down at the dead piece of plastic in his hand. The sun was still shining. The trees stood, impassive. But the world had fundamentally and irrevocably fractured. The entity in these woods didn't just mimic you. It didn't just hunt you.

It knew your future. And it was showing him exactly how he was going to die.