Chapter 4: The Official Story

Chapter 4: The Official Story

The silence on the trail was a physical weight, pressing in on them from all sides. For a long moment after the impossible realization, neither Liam nor Elara moved. They just stood on the pristine snow, two statues in the deepening twilight, their warm breath clouding in the freezing air. The world had tilted on its axis, and they were struggling to find their balance.

It was Elara who broke the spell. Her training, her ingrained sense of duty, clawed its way through the layers of supernatural horror. She reached for the radio clipped to her shoulder strap, her movements stiff, robotic.

“Whistler Base, this is Ranger Vance,” she said, her voice miraculously steady. “Do you copy?”

The crackle of static that answered was an obscenity in the sacred quiet. It was the sound of the other world, the one with rules and regulations, intruding on a place that had just proven it had none.

“Go for Base, Elara.”

“I’m on the upper switchbacks with a civilian witness,” she said, choosing her words with excruciating care. “We have a… potential missing person. Male, wearing a bright yellow jacket. Last seen on the trail just below the saddle, moving erratically. Requesting immediate SAR deployment.”

Liam watched her, a cold dread coiling in his gut. How could she report it? What words could possibly contain the truth of what they had—or hadn't—seen? A potential missing person. It was a neat, official box for an event that defied all logic.

The hike down was a grim, silent march. The beauty of the alpenglow on the peaks was lost on them, the serene landscape now feeling like a mask hiding something monstrous. Every shadow seemed to hold a flicker of yellow. Every sigh of the wind sounded like the start of a whisper.

They heard the search and rescue operation long before they saw it. First came the distant, rhythmic thwump-thwump-thwump of a helicopter, its sound waves bouncing unnaturally off the silent slopes. Then, as they rounded the final bend, the trailhead parking lot exploded into a scene of jarring, artificial chaos.

It was a violation. Red and blue lights flashed frantically, painting the stoic, snow-dusted pines in garish, pulsing colors. The lot was crammed with official vehicles—sheriff’s department, forest service, a large SAR mobile command unit. Men in bright orange vests moved with urgent purpose, their voices sharp and loud over the crackle of multiple radios and the idling rumble of engines. Beams from powerful flashlights cut sharp, white gashes through the darkness.

This was the world Liam had hiked up the mountain to escape: loud, mechanical, and intrusive. It was the world of screeching tires and flashing emergency lights, a world that held the ghost of his own past tragedy. Seeing it here, in his sanctuary, felt like a personal attack. His desire to understand what he’d seen was immediately suffocated by the overwhelming obstacle of bureaucracy and disbelief.

A man with a weathered face and ‘Henderson’ stitched on his jacket intercepted them. He was the lead ranger, and his eyes, weary and skeptical, sized Liam up in a single, dismissive glance.

“Vance,” Henderson said, his voice gruff. “Talk to me. What exactly did you see?”

And so the action began: the telling of an impossible story to a man who dealt only in the possible. Elara gave her report first, her voice clipped and professional. She stuck to the facts as they had appeared: the cry for help, the visual of a man in distress, the pursuit. She omitted the final, crucial detail of the missing footprints, a telling silence that hung in the air between her and Liam.

Then Henderson turned to him. “And you, sir? You saw the same thing?”

“Yes,” Liam said, trying to keep his voice even. “A man. Yellow jacket. He was running towards us, looked terrified.” He tried to be the scientist, the reliable observer. “He appeared to be in his late thirties, medium build, dark pants. The jacket was a bright, canary yellow. He was maybe fifty yards away when he went around the bend.”

Henderson made a note on his clipboard, his expression unreadable. “Fifty yards. At dusk. Light plays tricks up there. Could it have been a deer? A reflection off a piece of ice?”

“It was a man,” Liam insisted, a hot spike of frustration rising in his chest. “He looked right at us. We both saw him.”

Henderson’s gaze flickered to Elara, and Liam saw it then—the precariousness of her position. He saw the doubt in the lead ranger’s eyes, the calculation. She was a lone ranger on an isolated post, and she’d just called in a full-scale, expensive emergency based on a phantom. Liam remembered her story from the week before, the cry for help she’d heard with no evidence to back it up. This, on top of that, could be devastating for her career. The result was a feeling of complete powerlessness. He was armed with an impossible truth in a world that only accepted convenient facts.

The main search team was dispatched up the mountain, their headlamps a string of bobbing, artificial stars moving into the deep darkness. The helicopter, a noisy, metal dragonfly, finished its sweep and landed in a nearby clearing, its rotors whipping snow and pine needles into a frenzy. For an hour, Liam and Elara were left in a strange limbo, sipping watery coffee from styrofoam cups, surrounded by the hum of official activity but feeling utterly alone.

The turning point came when the initial chaos subsided. Henderson was absorbed in a map with the sheriff, and the radio chatter dropped to a low murmur. Elara found Liam by his truck, away from the glaring lights of the command post. She wasn't just tired or stressed. She looked hunted. The confidence she wore like a uniform had been stripped away, leaving behind a fragile, haunted exhaustion. Her eyes were wide, constantly scanning the dark tree line as if she expected the man in yellow to stumble out at any moment.

“They found nothing,” she said, her voice a flat, defeated whisper. The words didn’t need to be loud to be devastating. “The chopper did two passes with the FLIR camera before the team went up. No heat signatures. Nothing warmer than a rabbit on the entire slope. The search team just radioed in from the spot. It’s exactly as we left it. Our tracks leading up to the bend, and nothing beyond.”

Liam leaned against the cold metal of his truck, the last of his rational hope crumbling into dust. Heat signatures. That was data. Hard science. You couldn’t argue with infrared.

“So, what happens now?” he asked.

“They’ll keep a team up there for a few more hours, for due diligence,” she said, her gaze fixed on the distant, unfeeling peak. “Then Henderson will write his report. ‘Visual anomaly reported, extensive search yielded negative results.’ I’ll get a talking-to about wasting resources. Maybe a mandatory psych evaluation.” She gave a short, bitter laugh that held no humor. “The official story will be that we were mistaken.”

She fell silent, the weight of that official story pressing down on them. But they knew what they had seen. And Liam knew what he had heard two weeks prior. The whisper. Elara knew what she had heard just yesterday. The cry. This wasn’t a mistake. It was a pattern.

He was about to say something, to offer some useless word of support, when she spoke again, her voice barely audible.

“There’s an old story,” she said, her eyes still locked on the mountain. “From the first loggers and trappers who came through here. A bit of local folklore my granddad used to tell me.”

She finally turned to look at him, her eyes dark pools of reflected starlight and fear. The surprise, the real truth, came in a quiet, chilling rush, a legend that suddenly felt more real than any official report.

“They say Whistler’s Peak is a strange place. They say it doesn’t forget. The story is… the mountain keeps echoes of things that fall.”