Chapter 6: Blackwood Logging

Chapter 6: Blackwood Logging

The stolen Ford F-150 was an anonymous grey ghost on the pre-dawn highways of northern Minnesota. Jack drove with a singular, cold purpose that had burned away the edges of his panic. Fear was a luxury he could no longer afford; it had been replaced by the grim determination of a logistician faced with a catastrophic system failure. His system was reality itself, and the manifest number seared into his memory was the only tracking code he had left.

In his pocket, the wooden totem was a constant, unsettling presence. It was strangely warm to the touch, a knot of unnatural heat against his thigh. And with it came the whispers. They were no longer fleeting, external sounds but a permanent, low-level static inside his own head, a constant rustle of dry leaves just beneath his thoughts. Come home… find the grove… they seemed to murmur, a siren song from the dark, primordial forest of his vision. The totem was his proof, but it was also their leash.

He ditched the Ford in the long-term parking of a bus station in a town two counties away from Ely and walked until he found what he was looking for: a small public library, its brick facade promising quiet, anonymity, and free internet access. Inside, the hushed atmosphere was a jarring contrast to the chaos in his mind. He sat at a public computer terminal, the monitor’s glow illuminating the exhaustion etched on his face, and began to work.

His fingers, thick and calloused from years of gripping a steering wheel, moved clumsily over the keyboard. He started with the manifest number. He knew the internal formatting his old company used, and with a few educated guesses, he cross-referenced it through public shipping databases. It was a digital needle in a haystack, but logistics was a world of details, and Jack was a master of them. After twenty minutes of dead ends, a hit. A bill of lading, filed electronically. And there it was, in stark black and white.

Shipper: Blackwood Logging, LLC. Origin Point: Kettle Moraine Reserve, MN.

The name sent a fresh chill through him, colder than the hospital's antiseptic air. Blackwood. The name the trooper had whispered in the hall. It was real. He typed "Blackwood Logging" into the search bar.

The company had a bare-bones corporate website, all stock photos of smiling lumberjacks and text about sustainable forestry. It was a bland, corporate lie, and he knew it. He dug deeper, adding "Kettle Moraine Reserve" to his search terms. That's when the facade began to crack.

He found a string of old articles from local newspapers. A hiker who vanished without a trace ten years ago. A family whose car was found abandoned on a service road in the reserve five years prior, its doors wide open, with no signs of a struggle. Then he stumbled upon the forums—places for local hikers, hunters, and lovers of ghost stories. Here, the corporate narrative completely disintegrated.

One post, from a user named 'Northwoods_Nomad,' read: “Stay out of the Kettle Moraine, especially the tracts leased by Blackwood. The place is wrong. You get off the trail and the woods just swallow the sound. Compasses spin. GPS glitches. Feels like you're being watched by every single tree. Locals call it the Arrowhead Stillness. People go in, they don't always come out.”

Another user replied: “My grandpa used to say the old tribes avoided that land. Said things lived in the deep woods there, things that could mimic a human voice to lure you off the path. He called them ‘Tappers,’ because you’d hear them tapping on the trees all around you before you disappeared.”

Tappers. The word resonated with a sickening familiarity. He thought of the dry, scraping sounds the creatures had made, the splintering of wood as they moved. He was reading the footnotes to his own horror story. He now had the what—the Splinterfolk, the Tappers, whatever they were—and the where—Blackwood Logging’s operation in the Kettle Moraine Reserve. But he needed to connect it to the conspiracy, to the men who sanitized the site and lied to his face. He needed the who.

His mind went back to the border crossing. The young guard. Pale face, terrified eyes, the first person to break the silence of the lie. “You hear anything… just keep driving.” He wasn't part of the conspiracy; he was a crack in it. Jack closed his eyes, picturing the man’s uniform, the name tag. 'Davies.' It had been a common name, but the face was burned into his memory.

He left the library and found a payphone, the cold plastic receiver feeling like a relic from another age. He fed it a handful of coins scavenged from the stolen truck's ashtray and dialed the number for the border patrol station. He kept his voice low and professional, the practiced tone of a dispatcher confirming a route.

"Yes, I'm calling to follow up on a shipment that crossed last night," he began. "I just need to confirm a detail with the guard who cleared me. Officer Davies, I believe."

The woman on the other end was polite but firm. "I'm sorry, sir, but we have no officer by that name at this station."

"That's not right," Jack insisted, his grip tightening on the receiver. "Young guy, sandy hair. Worked the late shift."

"Sir," the woman's voice became cooler, more official. "I have the duty roster right here. There is no, and has never been, an Officer Davies assigned to this port of entry. Perhaps you have the name wrong."

A cold dread washed over him. They hadn't just moved him. They had erased him. He hung up the phone, his mind racing. Social media. He found a coffee shop, paid cash for a cheap coffee, and used their Wi-Fi on his new, untraceable burner phone he'd bought at a gas station. He searched for every 'Davies' who worked for Customs and Border Protection. He found a dozen, but none of them were the young, terrified guard from that night. Every potential lead was a ghost, a digital dead end.

He was being stonewalled. It was a complete, systematic blockade of information. The crash site was sanitized. The official records were sanitized. Even the memory of a young customs guard had been sanitized. They were isolating him, cutting off every avenue of investigation, leaving him alone with his impossible story.

Jack sat in the borrowed anonymity of the coffee shop, the low hum of conversation and the smell of roasted beans a world away from his reality. They thought they had him trapped. They had left him with no one to turn to, no evidence to show, and no one who would ever believe him.

But they had made one crucial mistake. They had left him the totem. And they had left him the location of the source.

He stood up, leaving the half-finished coffee on the table. He walked out into the afternoon light, a man with no job, no truck, and no name. He was a ghost, haunted by whispers and a vision of a dark forest. If the world was going to wall him in, he would not wait for the walls to close. He would go straight to the heart of the maze. He walked to the bus station, his new mission clear. The only way to get answers was to go to the source. He bought a one-way ticket north, a ticket that would take him to the edge of the Kettle Moraine Reserve. He was driving toward the very woods his nightmares were now made of.