Chapter 2: The Green Marker

Chapter 2: The Green Marker

Panic is a poor navigator. Alex ran with the wild, desperate energy of a cornered animal, driven by the ghost of that final, gurgling scream. He didn't dare look back. His world narrowed to the muddy, root-choked path directly in front of his stumbling feet, the burn in his lungs, and the frantic drumming of his own blood in his ears. He was running downhill, a fact confirmed by gravity's relentless pull and the jarring impact that shot up his legs with every uncontrolled step. Down was the way out. Down led to the car, to the road, to sanity.

He ran until the adrenaline began to sour in his veins, leaving behind a profound, leaden exhaustion. He slowed to a gasping, staggering walk, leaning against the rough bark of a massive pine to catch his breath. And in that moment, the woods fell silent again.

It was not the peaceful silence he had craved. It was a vacuum. The frantic noise of his own flight had masked its return, but now it was absolute. No birds, no insects, not even the whisper of wind through the canopy. The forest was holding its breath, listening. The sensation of being watched returned, no longer a vague prickle but a heavy, tangible pressure from all sides, as if the very trees were leaning in, their ancient, woody faces impassive and curious. Elara’s words echoed in the sudden quiet: The pines, they drink the light. It was true. The quality of the twilight hadn’t changed by a single degree. In the time he’d been running, the shadows should have deepened, lengthened. Instead, they were frozen, locked in the same perpetual gloom of his arrival.

A tremor of a new kind of fear, colder and sharper than raw panic, cut through his exhaustion. He pushed himself off the tree and forced his aching legs to move. He had to be close to the trailhead now. He’d been running downhill for at least ten minutes, probably more. Any moment, he would see the familiar clearing, the large wooden map, the gravel of the parking lot.

But the path just kept winding, a monotonous brown ribbon through an endless sea of green and black. He passed a cluster of moss-covered boulders, their shapes vaguely familiar. A moment later, a fallen log, so thick he had to clamber over it, blocked his way. Hadn't he passed these landmarks on his way up? His logical mind, desperate to reassert control, offered an explanation: trails often had recurring features, similar-looking formations. It was a classic symptom of disorientation, amplified by his stress and fear. The one-star reviews flashed in his mind—getting turned around for hours on a simple loop. He had scoffed then. Now, the memory felt like a prophecy.

He stumbled, his boot catching on a hidden root. He pitched forward, catching himself with his hands, his palms scraping against dirt and sharp pebbles. He stayed there for a moment, on his hands and knees, head hanging, every muscle screaming in protest. It was then that he saw it.

Just to the side of the path, snagged on the wicked thorns of a low-lying bush, was a small splash of color. A scrap of fabric, no bigger than his thumb.

It was green. A very specific, faded, familiar shade of green.

His heart, which had been hammering against his ribs, seemed to stop altogether. Slowly, as if moving through water, he reached out a trembling hand. He didn't want to touch it. He didn't want to confirm the impossible thought that was clawing its way up from the dark pit of his stomach. But he had to.

The fabric was coarse between his fingers, the texture as familiar to him as his own skin. It was from a hiking shirt. His hiking shirt. He looked down at his right sleeve. There it was—a fresh, L-shaped tear, the threads still frayed, from where a branch had snagged him during his frantic flight. He looked back at the scrap on the thorn bush. It was a perfect match.

The analyst in him, the man who lived by data and causality, desperately searched for a rational explanation. He had torn it on the way up, and in his panic, he hadn't noticed. He was simply passing the same spot again.

But that couldn’t be right. He had been running downhill. He was on the lower part of the trail, the return leg. The scream had come from above him, further up the mountain. He had run away from it, down, always down. This spot, this thorn bush, should be miles behind him and hundreds of feet above him.

He forced himself to his feet and looked around, truly seeing his surroundings for the first time since the scream. His eyes fell on the cluster of moss-covered boulders. Then to the thick, fallen log he’d just climbed over. The blood drained from his face, leaving behind an icy dread.

This was the exact spot. Not a similar spot. The exact one.

This was where he had stopped moments before, where the silence had become oppressive, where he had decided to turn back. This was the place from which he had heard the scream.

The logical framework of his world, the bedrock of cause and effect upon which he had built his entire life, fractured. It cracked and then shattered into a million pieces, leaving him adrift in a terrifying new reality.

He wasn't running out. He was running in a circle.

No, not a circle. A loop. The path wasn't taking him down the mountain; it was taking him back to the beginning of his terror. The strange distortion of time, the unchanging light, the feeling of being watched by a silent, patient audience… it all coalesced into one, monstrous, inescapable conclusion.

The pieces clicked together in his mind with the cold, final sound of a prison door slamming shut. The scream. High-pitched, ragged, full of a terror so profound it was barely human. It had come from up ahead on the trail, in the direction he had been walking. He now stood on that very spot. And he understood.

There was no other hiker. There was no murderer in the woods. There was only him.

The scream he had heard, the sound that had sent him fleeing in blind panic, had been his own. He hadn't heard an event that had just happened. He had heard an echo from his own future, a moment in the next cycle of the loop that was waiting for him, patiently, up the trail. He was running from himself.

The fear of a human threat evaporated, replaced by an existential horror so vast and absolute it stole the air from his lungs. He wasn't lost in the woods. He was a rat in a cage. And the cage was the trail itself. The mountain wasn't just a place of trees and rocks. It was a predator. And as Elara had told him with that unnerving, folksy calm: It takes what it needs.