Chapter 3: The Official Story

Chapter 3: The Official Story

The first thing he remembered was the sun. It was a merciless, blinding thing that stabbed through the canopy, and Liam’tore himself out of a briar patch, his arms and face crisscrossed with bleeding scratches. He was sobbing, great, gulping gasps for air that burned his lungs. The world was a smear of green and brown, spinning around him. He ran.

He didn’t remember the moment he and Greg were separated. The memory was a black hole of terror, a chaotic montage of snapping branches, his own ragged breathing, and the relentless, inhuman chanting that seemed to follow them through the trees. There was a moment, a flash of imagery that would forever haunt the edges of his sleep: a steep, muddy ravine, Greg’s hand slipping from his grasp as he scrambled up the other side, a panicked shout swallowed by the darkness. He had kept running. He hadn’t looked back.

He stumbled onto a gravel logging road like a creature born from the earth, covered in mud and blood and fear. A pair of fishermen in a rattling pickup truck found him there, a ghost in the morning mist, his words a nonsensical stream of “circles,” “masks,” and “whispers.”

The hours that followed were a blur of sterile, fluorescent-lit rooms. A sheriff’s deputy with a weary, skeptical face. A doctor who spoke in calming, patronizing tones. His parents, their faces etched with a grief and confusion so profound he couldn’t bear to look at them. He told his story, again and again. He described the silent figure by the creek, the bone-and-feather totems, the ritually butchered doe. He described the chanting circle, the bark masks, and the whispers that crawled inside his head.

They listened. They nodded. And then they sent the search party.

They found the campsite two days later. It was a wreck. The tent was shredded, their supplies scattered, food containers ripped open and strewn about the clearing. It looked, the sheriff explained with a gentle but firm finality, like a classic bear attack. A large, aggressive black bear, likely startled by their presence.

“What about the deer?” Liam croaked, his voice raw. “The totems?”

The sheriff shook his head slowly. There was no deer. No totems. No unnaturally coiled entrails. They’d found some animal bones, he conceded, but that was common in the woods. They found no strange footprints, no robes, no masks. Nothing to support his story. Just a trashed campsite, a missing boy, and his traumatized, incoherent friend.

The official story was written: Greg Miller, tragically killed in a bear attack while camping in a remote area of the Appalachian Mountains. Liam Carter, the lucky survivor, suffering from severe shock and PTSD.

The world accepted it. It was a neat, tragic story that made sense. A story that didn't involve chanting cults and whispers in the dark. Liam, trapped in the solitary confinement of his own trauma, had no choice but to accept it too. On the outside, at least.

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Three years passed.

Liam Carter became a ghost. The vibrant, promising college student died in those woods with his best friend. What emerged was a gaunt, hollowed-out man of twenty-four, his youth consumed by a quiet, gnawing dread. The dark circles under his eyes were permanent fixtures, monuments to three years of sleepless nights spent listening for chants that weren’t there.

He lived in a small, third-floor apartment in a city hundreds of miles from those mountains. The city was his fortress, its noise and concrete a shield against the suffocating silence of the forest. He worked a remote data entry job, a mind-numbing digital assembly line that required no human interaction and allowed him to remain within his four walls. His social circle had withered to nothing. Friendships required explanations, and explanations were impossible. How could he explain the guilt that felt like a physical weight on his chest, the crushing certainty that he had abandoned Greg in that ravine to save himself?

His apartment was his sanctuary, a cluttered cage of his own design. Maps he could no longer bear to look at were rolled up and shoved in a corner. Strings of cheap, decorative charms—bells and colored glass he’d bought from a street vendor—hung in the windows, a subconscious attempt to ward off unseen things. He had built a fragile peace, a life constructed on the lie the world had told him. The bear attack. It was easier than the truth. The truth was that something ancient and evil lived in those woods, and it had taken his friend. The truth was that he had run.

His fortress, he was about to learn, was made of glass.

It was a Tuesday. A day like any other. The mail arrived at 2:15 PM, as always. Liam padded down the stairs, the familiar creak of the third step the most eventful sound he’d heard all day. He sorted through the usual junk mail and bills, and then he saw it.

It was a small, square envelope made of coarse, brown paper that felt like a grocery bag. There was no stamp, no postmark. No return address. It had been placed in his mailbox by hand. His name, Liam Carter, was written on the front in thick, clumsy strokes of what looked like charcoal.

A cold dread, familiar and sickening, washed over him. His hands began to shake. Who knew he lived here? He hadn’t spoken to anyone from his old life in over a year.

Back in the sterile safety of his apartment, he locked the deadbolt and leaned against the door, his heart hammering against his ribs. The envelope felt wrong in his hand, a piece of the wilderness invading his concrete sanctuary. For a moment, he considered throwing it away, burning it. But he couldn’t. The not-knowing would be worse.

With trembling fingers, he tore it open.

There was no letter inside. Only a single, small object that fell into his palm. It was a twig, snapped from a birch tree, its bark pale and papery. Tied around it with a strand of dark hair was a tiny, yellowed animal tooth. It was a piece of the totems from the campsite. A memory made real.

He dropped the twig as if it had burned him. Inside the envelope, he saw that the charcoal letters weren’t just on the outside. A message was scrawled on the inner flap, the same crude, heavy-handed script. Four simple words that shattered his fragile reality and pulled him back into the screaming darkness of that night.

He has not forgotten you.