Chapter 5: Dreams in Yellow

Chapter 5: Dreams in Yellow

The goal, for the next seven days, was normalcy. Liam’s life was one of order and data, a world he could measure, categorize, and understand. He threw himself into it like a drowning man clinging to a raft. He worked late in his small office at the university, the sterile hum of the fluorescent lights a deliberate shield against the vast, menacing silence of the mountain. He plotted migratory bird patterns on a digital map, the clean lines and predictable algorithms a balm for a mind scarred by an impossible memory.

The obstacle was his own brain. It refused to cooperate. Logic, his most trusted tool, had become a blunt instrument, useless against the phantom that now haunted him. In the quiet moments between tasks, the image would flash behind his eyes, vivid and unwelcome: a bright yellow jacket against a backdrop of darkening pines, a face contorted in a rictus of pure terror.

The nights were the worst. Sleep offered no escape, only a high-definition replay of the horror. He would dream he was running, his lungs burning with ice-cold air, the crunch of his boots on the trail the only sound in the world. He’d hear the desperate cry—“Help!”—and see the man, always the man, stumbling, falling, fleeing from an unseen pursuer. He’d round the bend in the trail, his heart hammering with adrenaline and hope, and find… nothing. Only the pristine, untrodden snow, mocking him with its impossible perfection. He would wake up tangled in his sheets, the ghost of the man’s panic clinging to him like a shroud, his own shout dying in his throat.

The official story, the one written in Henderson’s neat report, was that they were mistaken. Fatigue, tricks of the light, acoustic anomalies. Liam had tried to cling to that explanation. He repeated it to himself like a mantra. But it was a lie, and his subconscious knew it. The memory became an infection. A yellow city bus would make his heart leap into his throat. A gust of wind rattling his apartment window at night sounded like the beginning of that ancient, sorrowful whisper. The mountain was bleeding into his world, its chilling irrationality seeping through the cracks of his carefully constructed reality.

He hadn’t called Elara. What could he say? Are the nightmares keeping you awake, too? Have you started seeing ghosts in the grocery store? Their shared experience was a chasm, not a bridge. It was a secret steeped in madness, and he felt an introvert’s instinct to retreat, to wrestle with the demon alone. Her parting words from that night echoed in his waking thoughts as much as the man's cry did in his dreams: The mountain keeps echoes of things that fall. He’d tried to analyze the phrase, to strip it of its folklore and find a scientific kernel. A temporal echo? A psychic imprint? The words were poetry, and he needed prose. He needed an explanation that would fit on an index card. He found none.

On Friday, a full week after the incident, the result of his efforts became clear: he had failed. He was sitting in his work truck, parked on a bluff overlooking a marsh, ostensibly observing waterfowl. But his binoculars were lowered, his notebook lay forgotten on the passenger seat. He hadn't recorded a single observation. He was just staring into the middle distance, his mind replaying the flashing lights of the SAR vehicles, the thumping rotors of the helicopter—the chaotic intrusion of the artificial world he so despised, a painful echo of the accident that had stolen his partner. The mountain had not been an escape. It had been a trap.

The turning point came with the mundane buzz of his phone. A notification from a local news outlet. He tapped it open, his thumb scrolling idly through the day’s headlines—a town council meeting, a high school basketball score, a minor traffic accident. He was about to put the phone away when a new headline appeared at the top of the feed.

Tragedy on Whistler’s Peak: Two Hikers Dead in Freak Icefall.

Liam froze. His breath hitched in his chest. His blood ran cold, a glacial chill that had nothing to do with the winter air outside. His finger trembled as he tapped the link.

The article was short, brutal in its efficiency. Three experienced hikers from out of state. A sudden, localized icefall on the upper switchbacks, just below the saddle. A massive sheet of ice and rock, dislodged by the recent freeze-thaw cycle, had swept two of them, a man and a woman, over the edge of a steep drop-off. The third hiker had been just out of the main path of the slide. He’d managed to call for help. The bodies had been recovered that morning.

Liam’s mind was reeling, trying to process the grim, logical facts. An accident. A terrible, tragic, but perfectly understandable accident. It was the kind of harsh reality the mountain dealt in, the kind of cause-and-effect he understood.

And then he saw the photograph.

It was taken at the trailhead, likely that morning. A man was being led toward an ambulance by a grim-faced sheriff's deputy. The man’s face was a hollow mask of shock and grief, his eyes vacant, his shoulders slumped in a posture of utter defeat. The article identified him as the lone survivor.

He was wearing a bright, canary yellow jacket.

The surprise was not a gasp, but a silent, violent shock that stole the air from his lungs. The phone slipped from his numb fingers and clattered onto the floor mat. The world outside his truck—the peaceful marsh, the gray sky, the distant trees—seemed to warp and dissolve.

It was him.

The face was no longer a pale, terrified blur seen from fifty yards away. It was real. The black beanie was gone, revealing matted brown hair, but the jacket was the same. Unmistakable. An obscene splash of color in a world that had turned to monochrome.

The cry for help. The frantic scramble down the trail. The desperate look back over his shoulder.

It hadn't been an echo of something that had already fallen. It was a premonition. A warning. The man hadn't been running from something unseen in the woods behind him. He had been running from the future. He was fleeing the ice and rock that had, a week later, torn his friends from his side.

The ghost they saw was real. The tragedy they had tried and failed to find had just happened. Liam squeezed his eyes shut, but the image was burned onto the back of his eyelids: the grief-stricken survivor in the yellow jacket, a living ghost who had run to them for help a week before he would ever need it. The mountain hadn't been replaying the past. It had shown them the future. And they had been powerless to stop it.