Chapter 3: First Glimpse

Chapter 3: First Glimpse

The world had shrunk to the sound of that single, sharp snap.

Chloe’s breath caught in her throat, a painful, silent gasp. Every instinct screamed at her to run, but the thick, cold mud held her fast, a greedy anchor in the suffocating darkness. She stood frozen, a statue of terror, with her phone held out like a useless ward. The light trembled in her hand, the beam dancing erratically over the gnarled roots and black, wet leaves.

She didn't dare turn around. She didn’t dare breathe. The silence that followed the sound was a living entity, heavy with anticipation. The game was over. The prank, if it ever was one, had ended. This was real. The messages from ‘Ava’ flashed through her mind—They don't like it when you stand still. Turn your light off. Was that a warning? Or an instruction from the thing behind her?

A slow, wet, dragging sound began. The sound of something heavy pulling itself through the bog. It was deliberate. Unhurried. It knew she was trapped. It knew she was terrified.

The primal need to see, to confront the source of her terror, finally overrode the paralysis. It was a slow, agonizing turn, a movement measured in fractions of an inch, as if moving too quickly would trigger an attack. She rotated her wrist first, sweeping the phone’s weak beam in an arc behind her.

The light passed over nothing but dark trees and mud. For a heart-stopping second, she felt a surge of delirious relief. She had imagined it. It was a deer, a falling branch, an overactive imagination fueled by old ghost stories.

Then she brought the light back, slower this time. And she saw it.

It was crouched low in the mud, not twenty feet away, its form so gaunt and its color so perfectly matched to the decaying forest floor that her eyes had slid right over it. It was humanoid, but horribly, fundamentally wrong. Its limbs were impossibly long and thin, bent at angles that suggested a brittle, insect-like fragility. Its skin was a sickly, pale grey, the color of wet ash, stretched so taut over its frame that the sharp ridges of its ribs were clearly visible even in the dim light. It had no hair, no ears, only a pair of large, dark pits where eyes should be—voids that seemed to drink the light from her phone.

The Glimmerman. The name surfaced from the depths of her childhood nightmares, no longer a silly story but a horrifying, tangible reality.

As the beam fully illuminated it, the creature slowly, deliberately, straightened from its crouch. It was taller than a man, a skeletal silhouette against the black woods. And then, it did the single most terrifying thing Chloe could have ever imagined.

It smiled.

It wasn't a smile of warmth or humor. It was a grotesque mimicry of the expression, a silent peeling back of thin, grey lips to reveal a row of small, needle-like teeth, too many and too sharp. The smile didn't reach its empty eyes; it was a detached, predatory grimace that stretched the skin on its face unnaturally wide. It was the smile of something that knew it had all the power, something that was enjoying the hunt, savoring her terror before the kill.

That smile shattered the last remnants of Chloe's paralysis. A raw, animal scream was torn from her throat, and with a surge of pure, adrenaline-fueled strength, she ripped her foot from the bog. Her sneaker was lost to the mud’s grip, a small sacrifice to the monster, but she was free.

She didn’t look back. She scrambled, half-running, half-falling through the treacherous terrain. With only one shoe, her socked foot slipped and slid, instantly soaked and numb with cold. Branches whipped at her face, snagging her hoodie, their touch like skeletal claws trying to hold her back. The phone’s light bounced wildly, illuminating chaotic fragments of the nightmare woods around her.

Behind her, the Glimmerman let out a sound. It wasn’t a roar or a growl. It was a high-pitched, clicking chitter, a series of rapid, sharp noises that echoed unnaturally through the silent trees. It was a call. A summons.

And the forest answered.

To her left, a flicker of movement. Another gaunt, grey shape detaching itself from the shadow of an ancient pine. To her right, a pair of dark, empty eyes blinking into existence between the leaves of a fern. They were silent, their footfalls making no sound on the forest floor. They moved with a horrifying, liquid grace, flitting between the trees, their skeletal forms appearing and disappearing at the edge of her frantic flashlight beam. Glimmermen. The name suddenly made a terrifying new kind of sense.

One was a nightmare. A pack was an apocalypse.

Her lungs burned. A sharp stitch stabbed at her side. Every muscle screamed in protest, but the clicking sounds were getting closer, multiplying, coming from all sides now. They were flanking her, herding her. She was no longer just running from a pursuer; she was a fox surrounded by hounds.

Her phone screen flickered. The battery icon flashed a dire warning. 15%.

“No, no, no, please,” she sobbed, her words lost in ragged gasps for air.

The path ahead was a steep, rocky incline. She clawed her way up, her fingers raw, her knees scraping against the sharp stones. The clicking was right behind her, so close she could almost feel a cold breath on her neck. She risked a glance over her shoulder. The first one, the one with the terrible smile, was yards away, scrambling up the incline with an unnatural, spider-like speed.

The phone screen flickered again and went dark for a full second before sputtering back to life at a fraction of its former brightness. 10%. The beam was now a pathetic, dying glow, barely enough to show her the ground two feet in front of her.

She reached the top of the incline and her remaining foot caught on a raised root, sending her tumbling forward. She landed hard, the impact knocking the air from her lungs. The phone flew from her grasp, skittering across the rock and coming to rest a few feet away, its dying light pointed at a dark slash in the rock face.

A cave.

The clicking was deafening now, a chorus of alien insects closing in for the kill. There was no time to think, no other path to take, no hope of outrunning them. It was a trap or it was a tomb, but it was her only choice.

With the last of her strength, Chloe scrambled on her hands and knees toward that patch of absolute blackness. She grabbed her phone, plunged into the cold, damp opening of the cave, and collapsed onto the stone floor, the sound of the chittering horde filling the entrance behind her.