Unlabeled skull

P.S. I know there are a lot of spelling and grammar errors; keep in mind that this is a first draft, and I am not fixing such errors right now. I am mainly looking for thoughts on the quality of writing and story itself.
The sky was grey and clogged with dark sagging clouds that seemed brooding and ready to release their sodden payload. Ironically the street was clogged with people who rushed antlike from place to place shoulders hunched eyes glancing furtively at the clouds. Amid the rush of black and brown and occasional blond heads rushing down the overladen sidewalks, there was a head of hair the shade of red on associated with crimson droplets of beaded blood or dark wine being swished in a glass.
Cain Caddel the owner of this remarkable hair, was not particularly special himself, at least in regards to his standing in society. He was a single middle-aged man who lived a comfortable and private life in a wooden cabin outside of the city. He had a golden retriever named Angel and had many books which he liked to read by the fire before bed. He had a standard paper pushing job in which he was competent and made good money in, but in which he had showed no inclination to climb the corporate ladder. He was gradually, though not slowly accumulating money for retirement. In short, Cain lived a comfortable life, the sort of which he had dreamed of when he had struggled simply to survive many years past. If Cain could describe his situation in one word it would be, content.
Cain was not in a hurry to get home to his dog and he did not care about the rain. He had felt it in the past and would feel it again. He only walked fast so as not to disrupt the swift tidelike flow of the crowd. The was nothing demanding his attention, nothing to stress him, nothing to bother him. Wasn’t this the closest thing to liberation a man could achieve? He had reached the final peak of all he had ever desired and he was satisfied. In that moment and for a reason which he could not precisely explain, Cain felt an intense, almost euphoric feeling of contentment. He felt a rising urge to laugh hysterically, but repressed it with surprising difficulty.
Perhaps it was the whim of a cruel God that made the following events happen when they did.
Cain felt a sudden ache in his head like how he felt midway through a bad headache, but as soon as it had appeared, the sensation vanished. It was as abrupt as running into a tree you hadn’t seen or teleporting somewhere utterly random. Then Cain missed a step and then another. He stumbled forward in a drunken shamble his head suddenly swimming in sluggish circles. Then he recovered. The entire sensation disappeared as instantaneously as it had appeared. For a moment Cain Found himself staring blankly at the ground too bewildered to notice anything.
But of course, then he heard the screaming.
It was the loudest scream the broke him out of his reverie. It was a man’s voice gibbering and high.
“STOP, STOP, STOP, STOP!,” repeated again and again mindlessly and pleadingly. The were other noises too. Whimpering moans, high wails, cries for help. Looking around Cain saw many people collapsed on the ground. The man who had cried stop was spasming violently and foaming at the mouth. His cries to stop were swiftly being replaced with vague gurgles. Most were not in the condition of the stop man though. Many quivered violently on the ground or screamed as though they were undergoing slow and brutal torture, but they were better than the stop man.
There were even a few stragglers who had not collapsed and had simply fallen to a knee or leaned against a wall. They all had faces screwed with pain and clenched fists. The faces of people who had just stepped on a nail or were undergoing surgery without medication.
Abruptly, Cain wondered why he was not experiencing such pain, or whatever it was. In the entire visible stretch of sidewalk he was the only one standing-
There was a deep thud and a crash of breaking glass as car crashed into the side of a glass skyscraper. Panes rippled and then shattered high up the building in a wave which left a wake of falling glittering shards. The shards fell among the catatonic people in a shattering rain. An errant piece hit Cain’s arm but failed to penetrate the fabric of his suit. Another grazed his temple, leaving a searing line of pain.
Cain decided to run.
He had no clue, no fucking clue what was going on, but staying outside seemed like a stupid idea. The smart move was to hide somewhere and wait this out. He felt a flash of guilt at the thought of leaving all the people out there to the mercy of errant cars and mysterious pain, but what could he do when everyone was affected? No, it was best to lie low and wait. Cain sprinted toward the nearest safe building, he had to be fast. there was no telling when the next derailed car would crash. He hopped over quivering torsos, and limp hands. Too limp. And the he pulled open the translucent glass door of some off brand looking retail store.
Without bothering scouting his surroundings, Cain ran through racks of wacky T-shirts and shelved of knickknacks, toward the back of the store which had an unlabeled door. Second floor, it must be! The first floor was unsafe, especially with all those windows, and that glass door. He needed high ground for safety.
There was a titanic roar and a concussion that thrust Cain forward and to his knees in a painful bump. The very windows he had been worried about burst violently inward along with dust, and debris, and…. and a red chunk. A chunk that looked like a piece of raw beef. It flew through the air and landed with a wet, small sound. A sound that seemed too small and too real. Cain stared at the chunk fascinated by it. He knew what it was, but.. No why think about it, it did no good. It would disctract him from what mattered. He needed to get to the second floor and wait for this die down, that was what he needed to do.
Everything would be fine and die down if he just waited on the second floor… Cain was still riveted by the chunk. it was red and glistening, and it pooled its redness around itself in a slow leak. Was like grocery store meat, so impersonal, so inhuman.
Cain stood, fast and shook his head like a dog. He turned around and walked through the unmarked door. It led to an unlit and narrow staircase with dirty white paint; the kind one would imagine coke gets snorted from liberally.
The staircase led to a hallway, which was essentially just a hallway version of the staircase: narrow dirty and poorly lit, and generally indicative of drug deals. There was a row of doors with golden numbers, and a shabby brown carpet and a row of windows overlooking the street. Amond a field of sprawling bodies there was a number of stragglers who stumbled drunkenly around the road as if they were heavily drugged. Glittering shards of broken glass sparkled cheerfully up between corpses and the occasional bang or scream could be heard In the background. A red flicker glinted off of the shards of glass.
“My fucking God, Lord have mercy, what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.” Cain whispered his eyes breathily to himself, speaking out loud for the first time since the disaster began. Scenes kept replaying in his mind, over and over again in a cruel loop. The man screaming stop again and again futilely, like a pig at slaughter who knows it is about to die. His bloodshot eyes rolling sightlessly. The sides of his mouth foamed with white froth. The car hitting the building straight on, confidently and without hesitation, the driver killing himself. The chunk of meat that looked beef from a grocery store that had plopped down beside him like a treat tossed to an obedient dog.
Cain closed his eyes and breathed in slowly and shakily, then he breathed out. He tried to blot out the images and shut out the cycle. Images kept multiplying and reappearing: Ameobus that multiplied after being cut apart. But eventually he calmed down enough to think and be rational. He opened his eyes, though his breathing was still ragged and shaking.
“Ok what the fuck.” He whispered to himself, knowing he didn’t need to whisper but not caring. “What happened?”
It was like an Emp to the brain that had swept over everyone at once and destroyed people’s circuitry, though not everyone had been treated equally.
He was the prime example of that.
He had gotten off easy with just bad headache and a stumble for a few seconds, whereas others sounded as if their very souls were being rent apart. What was the significance of his near immunity? He had not worn any special headwear or worn any special clothing. He had no metal on him apart from his watch, phone, and parts of his pants. Could it be that he had been standing in just that right place for the attack to affect him to a lesser degree, the same way a lucky blind man could survive a hail of arrows by standing in the right place? It seemed unlikely. And he was already assuming it was an attack in the first place. It could have been aliens or the fucking wrath of God.
There was no benefit to speculation anyway, he needed to focus on the present. As it was, all he knew was that everyone in the immediate area was either dead or wandering in a drugged daze. He had no knowledge of how extensive this effect was; for all he knew, the entire continent, or hell the entire world had been affected. He could be the only sane person alive in the world.
So he should try to gather information, then. Cain took out his phone and opened the news app to the most recent story.
Oklahoma F4 Hurricane Kills Four, 10 Million In Estimated Damages.
Not surprising. The event was too sudden for anyone to make a news story already, and, if this had happened everywhere of course, who would make it ? All the writers and journalists were probably dead or more fucking zombies.
Wait what was he doing anyway? He didn’t know how extensive this was and for all he knew it could have only affected the immediate area. The police station was an hour away; it could be unaffected!
He dialed 911, it rang once, then twice, then three times, then ten times, then twenty. He glanced at his watch after five minutes and hung up the call. No good, he was being too optimistic.
So what did he do now? The news was out, and the police were probably the same as everyone else. There were no friends he wanted to call, and his mom was long dead. Any siblings either didn’t exist or were too separated for him ever to find them. He stared blankly at the useless keypad of his phone app for a minute before an idea came to him.
He opened Facebook, eyes glued to the blue f and heart beating rapidly. This would work, he knew it would. People of all kinds, all over the world used Facebook. If anyone else was alive in reasonable numbers, then there would be some kind of information on Facebook. And maybe this fucking nightmare only occurred in the surrounding few miles. Maybe the police were just busy and unable to pick up, that would be understandable given the situation. Maybe the news was working on a story right now and it was breaking news on every tv in bars and stores and houses all across America.

Breaking News: A deadly and unexplainable phenomenon engulfed the California Town of Mount St Louis. Initial Probe reveals thousands dead and thousand more catatonic. Experts are still researching cause…

The blue f faded and revealed a list of posts. The first was a picture of a solemn looking yellow lab curled in a corner surrounded by puppies with the snarky title of: Running from Her Responsibilities. The post was from six days ago.
Cain felt an irrational and sudden dip in his excitement but forced it away. Was he expecting all his desires to be magically fulfilled in the first second of opening the app? It wasn’t like Facebook regularly showed posts from less than an hour ago in the feed. But… With a frown, Cain went to preferences and switched to most recent. The blue F returned and disappeared as the page loaded and Cain’s Eyes widened, his heart beating rapidly and his chest feeling light and airy.
All of the most recent posts were about the same thing. I collapsed and now everyone around me is... Does anyone know if the police….Can someone…I was cooking and my wife fell over do you… Please help…
The posts were all accompanied by pictures. They were all different, many showed pictures of the street in different towns, all with the same story: people collapsed everywhere with a few stragglers, often crashed cars or damage was visible. Many people were isolated or with a friend or family and posted about collapsing and not being able to contact anyone or about family dying in extreme pain. One man survived after driving on a crowded highway, his picture showing a hellscape of overturned cars, scattered metal with intermittent fires, and sprawled and dismembered corpses.

Cain’s heart pounded in a dreadful THUMP THUMP that resonated through his chest in cruel and rapid beats. There were posts from everywhere. There was one from Florida and one from South Dakota, and dozens more from unnamed towns that could be anywhere. America was dead.
Jesus Christ is the world over? His legs weakened, whatever passive energy that had been holding them up draining out like water through sieve. He fell to his knees with a dull thump, but his didn’t care about the pain. A funny thought occurred to him.
I actually fell to my knees. I thought that was just the kind of shit people say when they’re being overdramatic.
The world was over. He knew it. This was not some attack, there was no technology that could do this. It might be aliens and it might be God, though it was probably something else. But it didn’t matter. It was over.
He sat there for a second just thinking about it all. He had been walking home to see Angel, then he was going to make dinner. He had been thinking about grilling a burger, and he would give some to her. He would read more of a mystery novel he had found at the Barnes and Noble. It was light thing, the book version of popcorn, but he wanted to finish it. He was going to work tomorrow. What was going to happen now? What did he do now?

Well first he had to wait and then of course he needed food and water and shelter. And he would obviously need to make it home to Angel. The streets would be clogged with crashed cars and corpses, so no driving fa car for poor old Cain. Maybe a bike or a motorcycle? He couldn’t drive one but he could take it slow. There would be no angry drivers honking the shit out of him for going 10 miles per hour. And when he got the hang of it he could go faster, maybe 20. But it the roads looked like the hellscape in the post he saw, then maybe he would have to stick to 10.

He felt a bit of pressure pass out from him like air whistling out of the end of an overfilled balloon. He knew what to do, yeah the world probably, well almost certainly, ended, but he had a solid course of action for the next few days. He just need to wait another hour to be absolutely sure nothing would explode or fall or otherwise reduce him to the state of one of the fortunate people lying dead on the street.
He leaned back against the wall and looked at the shoddy golden letter seven on the door opposite him. Behind him, the laden clouds finally released their load. Heavy droplets of rain pattered down on the dead streets. On the pavement, a man whose gaze was vacant of the normal thoughtfulness and constant analysis of a human being looked up as a cold droplet impacted his forehead. He stood where he was for a moment, his hair soon growing flat and waterlogged his suit clinging to his round middle-aged body, almost seeming to contemplate this new development. Then he kept walking forward, his steps slow and seemingly deliberate.



























Chapter 2.
David Sharp walked down the streets of New York in his standard relaxed yet confident stride, both of his hands in the pockets of his suit pants. It was one of his daily suits, fashionable, and quite expensive, but only enough that it evoked admiration and respect, not jealousy or annoyance at a pointless display of wealth.
He glanced down at a particularly twisted looking corpse. It was a thin and tall woman with equally thin and long blond hair. She wore a homemade looking sweater and had on a delicate pair of slip on shoes. She seemed like the type to bring her neighbors casseroles and call you hon or dear, or so he theorized.
As she was, her mouth was stretched open wide enough to fit a small melon, her jaw looked purple and discolored, the bones seemed to be in almost the wrong place. Her cheeks traced tears of dried blood from empty sockets where eyeballs had burst. Her torso was twisted like a rag doll from a spine broken in pained thrashing.
“Oh my dear, I’m so sorry for you” he said, his voice soft and genuine.
He looked up at a small figure who was standing father down the street.
This was not one of the zombie people whose minds had been broken by the event, but a person, he knew it.
He kept walking forward, his stride now cautious and unsure. He looked around at the broken city around him as if searching for something. When he neared the man, he snapped his head toward him.
“Hey, are you alive?! He rushed up to the man “You don’t look like one of them”
The man turned around to look at David. His eyes were vacant, but not in the same way as the zombies. He wore a dirty band shirt and black exercise pants. His feet were scraped and red and he only had flip flops on.
“Laura, she died. She just died.” He said it in a the monotone of a college student doing a presentation about an obscure African tribe.
“she just fell over and started flailing her arms and screaming. I fell over too and I couldn’t do anything. When I was better, she was dead. I felt her pulse, and she felt too cold. She was pregnant. The baby is dead now too.
David touched the man’s shoulder.
“Come on, you need to eat and get inside. My house is nearby.” He smiled gently.
“I am much luckier than you, since there was no one for me to mourn. Feel welcome to stay as long as you need.”
He guided the man to his apartment with a hand on his back. The man followed with no resistance, his eyes stared constantly forward at some unknown point.
David guided the man to an elevator and up his suite on the fourth floor of the skyscraper. It was a perfect suite. Massive, with high ceiling and white ceiling lights that washed the entire apartment with an even glow, it was full of the kind of modern furniture that made use of simple geometric shapes to create an elegant but straightforward appearance.
He guided the man to an armchair in front of his custom flatscreen. The man sat down, accepting easily. He took to David’s guidance like a lost puppy, his mind was still pliable from his crushing loss, David could feel it.
In fact, David could feel it much more easily than normal. It was not just his ability to flawlessly modulate his emotions and analyze those around him. Martin was open to him, his mind was peeled apart by his loss: a normally solid wall, crushed by a fierce battering ram of emotional destruction.
Martin! That is his name, I am utterly sure.
David’s facial muscles twitched up in an involuntary smile, perhaps the first involuntary emotional response he had experienced since early childhood.
This could be very good. And he had the perfect test subject sitting placid and pliable, waiting for his guiding hand.
David reached out with an invisible hand toward Martin’s mind. He had always had the hand, he realized, but it had been more of a finger. It nudged, prodded, and massaged, but it lacked force, so much force that he had not known he had been using it. It was many times stronger now, maybe hundreds of times.
The hand plunged into the soft pliable mind as one would plunge their arm into a bowl of Jello.
“Uuuh!” Martin said.
He jerked slightly as if he had been shocked.
The fingers felt Martin’s Love for Laura and her blond hair and mischievous jokes, and the crushing, overwhelming emotional emptiness when he felt her cold dead corpse. The fingers explored, wiggling and invading. Martin’s Childhood memories were in there, they saw that he had gone to college for a year, but realized that he had always been too lazy to really apply himself. They saw him meeting Laura at the office and getting to know her. She was always serious when working, but she had a cute side where she laughed and joked. He had a love for classic video games, especially Mario, and he…
Martin was spasming violently, his hands clawed at his scalp and ripped out chunks of dirty black hair as though he was trying to remove a rabid rat from his skull.
He went. “UUUH, UUUUUHH, UUUUH!”
The hand stopped exploring and retracted carefully.
David sped over to the pathetic man, whose head now lolled loosely on his shoulder. He put a hand on Martin’s shoulder.
“Martin, Jesus, what happened? Did it happen to you again, the thing that killed everyone, I mean?
He ran over to Martin’s other side and examined his face.
The eyes were now as vacant as a zombie and a line of translucent drool traced down his chin and neck. His body was limp and responseless.
The hand split apart into many tiny gentle tendrils and wormed their way into Martin’s mind. David had not known he could do it until he had already started.
The hand had mashed and scrambled Martin’s weakened mind: a clumsy toddler playing with a fragile nest. The tendrils were very different.
They wormed their way quietly and harmlessly along, moving, fixing, rearranging; a hundred thousand fingers, reassembling a shattered mind.
More than a mere 100 times stronger
Martin bucked a few times, some invisible mechanisms being triggered accidentally. Then the vacant eyes were once again occupied. Martin sat up in his chair as his muscles regained control.
Martin stared fixedly at the T.V. then turned to examine the furniture and the window with the view of New York. He brought his hand to his face looking, most likely, at the dirty fingernails and scabbed over cuts. He put his hand down and sat for a few moments.
He stood and turned around, now looking at David. His eyes were no longer crushed and empty, but wide and confused.
“How…how did I get here?”
David smiled.
“I found you wandering around the street and at first I thought you must be one of those zombies. But I was walking nearby, and I saw that you looked a little different. It was hard to put a finger on; a certain clearness of the eyes, maybe. So I asked if you were alive and you responded with some meaningless sounds. It was quite clear that your mind was barely holding on.”
“Of course, I never leave a man in need so I escorted you to my house and set you down in a chair. It seemed likely to me that in your case the ailment of the mind was of a lesser degree and might heal over time. As we both can see, you are standing.”
Martin stood and absorbed the stream of information the same as a stone cliff might absorb a passing wind.
“I think… I lost something, but I can’t remember. Its fuzzy, I-“
“Oh God, Oh Shit!”
Suddenly he leaned forward as if he had been struck in the crotch and held his head.
“It fucking hurts!” Martin screamed, “Oh fucking God, it hurts!
David walked over to Martin and eased him into the chair.
“Sit down,” he said in his most gentle voice. “sit here for a second and you will feel a little bit better.”
David put his hand on Martin’s back and soothed. The hand’s touch soft and guiding, massaged the aching mind.
After a few minutes Martin’s back muscles relaxed.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
“Do not thank me. I am simply doing my duty as a decent human being.”
Martin turned to David with a face of mixed gratitude, and intense confusion.
“Please… what happened.”
“First, you should look outside. It will explain better than I am capable of. Hold on to your stomach.”
Martin walked toward the window with an unsteady studder to his steps. He tilted his down and looked at the street only to jerk back in shock. Little black shapes littered the street, and several cars were piled on top of each other like pancakes tossed in a lazy pile.
“Jesus!”
Before Martin could speak further, David began explaining
“I do not know exactly what happened, but three days ago, there was something like a wave that swept over everyone in the world, as far as I can tell. Most died, and most who survived turned into what I and the remainder of the internet is calling zombies; people who live but only in the scientific sense. They have no mind; they walk around in a shambles without any apparent direction. Out of those who did not die, a bare fraction retained their mind: their ability to think and make logical decisions.”
David spoke in the businesslike but sad-tinged tone of someone who has accepted a truth but has yet to fully move past it.
“I do not know what spared this group, whether it was some unknown factor or pure random chance. But I would be surprised if more than 1 in 1000 people survived, though that is a wild guess based on nothing but my own intuition. You are the first person I have seen that I am absolutely sure is not a zombie.”
“I believe that your headache and your fuzzy mind were caused by the wave. I theorize that the wave affected everyone to a different degree, in the most extreme cases, people died in minutes, but some took hours to die. I believe you were affected almost to the point of zombification, but the effect ended right on the brink between a living mind and a shattered one. When I found you, your eyes seemed to have a spark of intelligence but little more.”
Martin still looked out of the window, with a hunched back and dark hair hanging in strings.
“What about me…what happened to me? I lost something.”
David walked next to Martin; lips pinched in a sympathetic line.
“Martin, I don’t know… how could I? Everyone in the world had to deal with the wave on their own. I felt pain like you did. How could I have been there when it happened to you? I only found you by chance. As your mind strengthens it may come to you and it may not, that is the best I can tell you.”
Martin turned to look at David, his eyes were bloodshot from tears, his stubble and greasy strands of hair seemed to stand out.
“How do you know my name? I never told you.”
David smiled his gentle smile again.
“You let it slip out while you were a near zombie. I thought it would be good for you to hear it again, nothing more than that.”
The hand reached out to Martin’s mind, ready sooth away irrational anger and needless distrust, but it felt a wall. A wall of sturdy steel-hard will.
Martin’s eyes grew wide and he took a step back.
“You, you just tried to do something to me! I felt it in my mind!
David’s smile smoothly transitioned into an expression of affront and sad understanding.
He spoke slowly and with a hint of hurt.
“David, I know that you are confused and angry, but all I have ever done is help you. Please try to direct your anger at something else. I do not mind being supportive, I cannot help if you lash out.”
Martin’s expression softened, and he hesitated.
It was then that the hand, now a fist, struck.
The wall of steel shattered and the hand drew back splitting apart into tendrils which weened their way into the crevices of Martin’s mind.
Martin instantly relaxed, all anger and suspicion disappearing like a candleflame before a gale.
But then a wave a steel hard resolve exploded out of Martins mind and the tendrils were blown apart.
The hand started reforming itself.
I cannot be gentle with this one.
Martin’s face screwed up in an expression of utter rage.
“You FUCK, you BASTARD, it was you wasn’t it!”
Martin charged at David a pocketknife gleaming in his hand.
Hidden the whole time.
David turned on a heel and dodged Martin. Of course he had taken self-defense courses. He could defeat and immobilize Martin easily, but Martin was useless now, he was too fargone to be worth keeping.
David, caught Martin’s wrist and with an efficient twist, had Martin on his stomach with an arm stuck behind his back. There he patiently waited. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.
The hand reformed.
Four seconds. Five seconds….
David fed his will into the hand, increasing its size and its power.
Ten seconds.
The hand seemed about to explode. It was a white-hot pulsing mass of will.
Martin seemed about to know what was going to happen.
“PLEASE, PLEASE, STOP, I’M SORRY-“
The hand crashed into Martin’s feeble wall.
It tore apart like a thin sheet of rice paper.
It sank deep into Martin’s mind and he moaned in pain. David felt more and more of Martin’s memories. They came earlier and earlier the deeper he went until he saw a sweet face with dark hair and red lips, and feeling of warmth and simple love. Then he let the hand explode.
Martin Jerked upwards almost throwing David off of him and then went limp. Blood pooled from where his eyes faced the floor.
David, got up and walked to the window with his hands behind his back.
“It seems that I am not the only one who changed.”










Chapter 3

A few years ago, I decided I needed a major life change. Everything seemed to be going downhill- my finances, my mental health, my life. I would go weeks without sleeping sometimes as the heavy traffic passed through the city streets down below. Every time I went outside, I saw more homeless people, more needles and crack pipes littering the ground, more muggings and assaults and overdoses and deaths. The city had become a wasteland, and I knew it was time to leave.
I had no girlfriend, no wife, no kids. My parents had both died a few years prior and I barely talked to my siblings anymore. I had nothing to tie me down to this place where I felt like I was dying inside a little more each day.
That was when I sold nearly everything I owned, got in my car and drove up to Alaska to try starting anew. I bought a small cabin and a plot of land in the middle of its majestic mountains and dark, enchanting forests. In the winter, the Northern Lights would shine through like the eyes of God, sending out divine trails of light that danced through the sky in cosmic waves.
And while the move did help give me some peace of mind, in the end, the source of all my problems had ultimately followed me thousands of miles into this endless wilderness. It would take me a long time to realize the cause of all this misery was myself.
Because, as a wise man once said, “Wherever I go, there I am.”
***
I lived in that cabin for three months without any major issues other than the constant threat of bears, moose and wolves. I had a rifle and a shotgun for hunting, a small garden in the backyard and a solar panel to generate electricity.
“This is the life,” I said, relaxing on a hammock I had strung across the corner of the cabin while staring at the endless beauty directly outside the window. White-capped mountains loomed like giants in front of thick clusters of evergreens. A virgin covering of fluffy snow made the entire world glisten and sparkle. There wasn’t a house or road in sight.
“No work, no stress, no pollution, no cars honking all the time…” I closed my eyes, breathing in the clean air. I ended up falling asleep for a couple hours, waking up just as the Sun had started setting. Bright orange streaks mixed with the bloody smears of the fading light as it disappeared behind the mountains.
I groggily arose, stumbling over to make a cup of instant coffee. As I sipped it, I wandered around the room, looking for something to pass the time. There were still quite a few random objects left behind by the last owner that I hadn’t gotten rid of yet. I had moved in to find a stocked bookshelf filled with classics by Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Bored, I started rifling through the collection, looking for something good to pass the time. As I shuffled past “A Maze of Death” and “Ubik”, something caught my eye.
A black, leather-bound book with no title or author name stood there, its cover faded with time and wear. Curious, I pulled it out and opened it. I saw the cursive scrawled across the pages in a neat, copperplate script and realized it was a diary left behind by the previous owner. The first entry was dated “January 9th, 2015.” This is what it said.
***
“I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not. I went into town to talk to my therapist yesterday and she said I should try writing everything down. She talks to me like it’s all in my head. But I know it’s not.
“When I first moved into the cabin, it seemed like Paradise. I never thought in a million years that something would be slinking around at night. I never thought it would be hiding under my bed, peeking in windows and following me like a shadow.
“Right now, I’m snowed in with a cup of coffee in one hand and my pistol in the other. I can’t sleep anymore. I keep hearing something shuffling around under the bed. Sometimes, I think I even hear ragged breathing, as if a corpse with dirt in its lungs had come back to life.
“I’ve caught glimpses of that thing in the darkness. Whatever it is, its skin is loose, almost falling off the bone. It almost looks like a naked, emaciated man. Its eyes are rotted and dark, its back hunched, its spine twisted and jutting out like tumors. It moves in this slow, jerky way, but I can never seem to catch it. Its body seems broken and out of alignment. Its legs bend the wrong way sometimes.
“By the time I turn on the lights or try to take a video of it, it’s always disappeared. But its fetid odor remains. It lingers in the cabin like a sweet-smelling, spreading infection.
“I don’t know what it wants from me. I want to leave, but with the storm raging outside, I’m stuck here, unable to get all the way back to town. The snow surrounds the cabin in mounds five feet high. I feel like a prisoner caged with a rabid beast, not knowing when it will strike.
“My wife claims she hasn’t seen or heard anything, but she keeps vanishing on me. Last night, she disappeared in the middle of a snowstorm. Where did she go? I asked her in the morning, but she said she was here the whole time. She didn’t remember anything. There’s no way she went into town. There wasn’t time and the trails were impassable that far down.
“Something’s going on here, but I don’t know what it is. I’m truly scared for our lives.”
I slammed the diary shut, not wanting to read anymore. I didn’t want to become infected by some kind of contagious cabin fever. If the last owner had gone insane in the mountains and started hallucinating naked corpses crawling around, I really didn’t want to know.
I shoved the diary back in the bookshelf, going for “A Maze of Death” instead. I tried to forget what I had read in the diary as I flew through the novella. All night, I tried to get the image of the naked, twisting man with rotted eyes out of my head, but I couldn’t.
I eventually fell asleep right before dawn. But, as my eyes were closing, I thought I saw a silhouette in the window- a starved man with excited, black eyes that seemed to be rotting out of his skull. I thought I saw him put his inhumanly long fingers against the glass as he leaned forward. I blinked, sitting up and glancing out into the white, snow-covered wonderland.
There was nothing there.
***
Another hunter occasionally followed the deer trails near my cabin. A frozen lake stood a quarter-mile away, the surface white and covered in thick drifts of snow. I bundled up, deciding to go outside for a hike in the frigid dawn. I strapped on my snowshoes and grabbed my shotgun, as I always did when I went outside. I never knew when a polar bear might be waiting around the next tree, after all.
I opened the door, seeing footprints pressed into the snow all around my house. At first, I thought it was that silhouette I had seen, the nightmarish thing from the diary. But the footprints didn’t go over to my window. They followed the trail twenty feet away, veering off towards the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill. I glanced down in that direction, seeing a black figure plodding slowly forward.
“Steve!” I cried, recognizing my only neighbor in a four-mile radius. He had a cabin about a mile away on his own little plot of land. He jumped, clearly startled by the sudden noise. His black snow pants and heavy fur coat swished together as he spun, raising his rifle high. When he saw me, he immediately lowered it and put a gloved hand up in a friendly greeting.
“Hey Josh! Surprised to see you up this early,” he yelled over the muted wintry landscape. Sounds always seemed different after it snowed, as if all the noise in the world had become faded and dead.
“Yeah, I’ve been having a little trouble sleeping,” I said, slinging my shotgun around my shoulder. “What are you doing anyway?”
“Just a little hunting, you know,” he said, giving me a sly wink. “Animals are always most active around dusk and dawn, it seems. That’s when I always have the best luck, anyway.” He stepped close to me, staring me in the eyes. “You do look like shit. Those bags under your eyes are big enough to carry groceries in.”
“Yeah, trust me, I know… Hey, this might sound a little weird, but did you know the previous owner of this cabin?” I asked. Steve’s wrinkled, old face fell into a scowl. His expression immediately became guarded and distant.
“Sure, sure, we met,” he exclaimed bluntly. He seemed to be searching my face for something, but I didn’t know what. His reaction left me feeling off-balance and nervous.
“Is he still around?” I said. Steve’s scowl deepened.
“Buddy, I don’t know what this is about, but he’s dead. He’s been dead. He died in that cabin, actually.” He pointed a finger at my home accusingly. With those words, my heart seemed to drop into my stomach. Waves of dread flowed through my body like water.
“How… how did he die? Like a heart attack or something?” I asked. Steve’s gaze turned downwards. He didn’t meet my eyes.
“Do you know that Alaska has the highest missing persons rate in the entire United States? It’s not even close. In fact, for the population size, we have far more people who go missing and never get found than anywhere else. They even have a name for it: the Alaska Triangle,” Steve said. “And we’re square in the middle of it.” I stared blankly at him, wondering where he was going with this. It seemed like a way to avoid answering my question.
“No, I didn’t know that…” I responded. Steve nodded, raising his head again. He heaved a deep sigh.
“Look, the thing with the last owner and his wife… it’s somewhat disturbing. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you, but it’s certainly not going to help your peace of mind. And it definitely isn’t going to help you get some sleep.”
“I want to know,” I insisted instantly. The wind started to whip past us. Flakes of ice and snow flew sideways in the sudden currents.
“Let’s go back to your cabin then,” Steve said, pulling his heavy fur-lined hood off and shaking out his long, black hair behind him. “I could use a bit of whiskey to warm up.”
***
We sat down with a bottle of Johnny Walker and two shot glasses. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but Steve certainly was. He chugged three shots in the span of a minute. I sipped at mine, drinking half and putting it back down on the coffee table with a thunk. Steve grunted, hissing through his open mouth for a moment.
“Ugh, that’s the good stuff,” he said, slamming his chest as the burning liquor worked its way down. Steve looked up at me with a new sparkle in his eyes. “Huh, so you want to know about what happened to Will Lenning. Well, I’ll tell you that no one really knows the whole story. I used to see him occasionally, come down and have a drink and talk. We all know each other around here, obviously.” I nodded, motioning him on. “He seemed like a normal, upstanding guy. He kinda reminded me of you, actually. A young guy trying to escape the hustle and bustle of the city life, the cancer of the American Dream.
“Well, he was here for maybe a couple months, I don’t know. Everything seemed fine. We used to go skeet shooting occasionally, have a beer, you know. We’d get together with a couple other hunters who live closer to town and sometimes play some poker. I never saw anything odd about Will. I never could have predicted what happened to him.” He heaved a long sigh at this, looking out the window at the sharp mountains with an expression of nostalgia.
“Well, what happened to him?” I asked, encouraging him to go on.
“He started talking about seeing someone peering in through his window at night. He talked about hearing sounds from under his bed while he was laying there in the dark- sounds like diseased breathing and shuffling. He started keeping all the lights on in his cabin twenty-four hours a day.” Steve leaned close to me. A glimmer of fear rippled across his pale, wrinkled face. “He started to lose his mind. Started digging holes all over the place, looking for something. Even in the middle of snowstorms, I would occasionally see him outside, digging. It seemed like he never slept anymore. It was classic cabin fever if I ever saw it.
“It was only a few weeks later that I came over here, concerned. I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, which was fairly unusual. I found the door hanging wide open. Propped up in a chair in the exact spot where you now sit, Will lay with a blast hole showing clear through his skull, a shotgun laying at his feet.
“And next to him, I found a blood-stained diary opened to the middle page. The last entry was stained with blood spatter, but still visible. I remember leaning down and reading it. It was only a few sentences long.” I glanced over at the bookshelf with the same diary, saying nothing.
“It said something like, ‘I see now what’s going on. The Twisted Man is leading me to the truth. Today, I will finally find it.’”
“And that was his suicide note?” I asked, my heart hammering in my chest. He nodded.
“Yeah. I went into town and got some rangers to come check it out. Eventually, they got cops and CSI there. They took all the stuff as evidence, including the diary,” he said. “Good riddance, I say. Reading something like that is never beneficial. Sometimes delusions spread like a virus, you know what I mean?” I did, but I said nothing. I glanced back at the diary, its black leather cover gleaming like a crouching snake.
And I wondered- if the police took the diary as evidence, how did it get back here?
***
“You said he had a wife living here with him, too?” I asked.
“Yeah… she went missing around the same time,” he said. “Pretty bizarre. The cops thought maybe she just moved away, but…” He shook his head grimly. “As far as I know, she was never seen again. It was like she had evaporated into thin air.”
After Steve left, I walked stiffly over to the bookshelf, taking down the diary. I flipped open through the pages. In the middle, I found the last entry. Spatters of old, darkened blood were scattered over the page like raindrops. I found the suicide note and read the date.
“January 27th, 2015,” it read. Will Lenning had not lived long after he started seeing the Twisted Man. I wondered if my fate would be the same.
The Sun had started to set outside as I sat with the diary at the small circular kitchen table, eating some stewed venison and rice as I read through the entries. At the end, Will Lenning said the Twisted Man had been trying to guide him somewhere, that, in fact, the Twisted Man had been trying to protect him from some great evil, rather than being the source of it.
I scoffed, feeling a flash of anger at his stupidity. His naivety obviously led to his death. But then a flash of insight struck me like lightning.
What if I was committing the same kind of stupidity? Perhaps I should just grab my gun and valuables and leave. I could take off on the snowmobile and be in town within a couple hours.
But, in my heart, I knew I would not. Something about the mystery of all this beckoned me to stay. Like a siren leading sailors to destruction, my curiosity called out to me, and I knew I would not be leaving that night. I needed answers.
And, sadly, I would find them.
***
I had fallen asleep with an empty bottle of beer in my hand. I sat in front of the TV, which only got satellite reception. There were, of course, no cable or phone lines threading their way through the forest. All of my power came from stored solar energy. Since I rarely watched TV and really only used it to cook or heat up water for bathing, the energy produced was sufficient even in winter. Tonight, though, I needed its sound, its mindless flashing of light and colors and canned laughter. It seemed to drive away the creeping, suffocating presence like a candle.
I woke suddenly. The TV flashed with static. The repetitive hissing of the white noise spit from the speakers like thousands of snakes. I glanced up at the clock. 3:33 AM. I looked around the dark cabin, confused for a long moment. I didn’t understand what had woken me so abruptly. The satellite had never gone out before, either, even with the howling winds and freezing hail of the Alaskan winter.
The TV started flickering as if the static were rising upwards. Black lines traced their way horizontally across the screen. The hissing deepened into a gurgle, and for a second, I thought I heard faint words behind the white noise. I thought I heard breathing, slow and diseased, like the death gasp of a drowning man.
A black line rose across the TV and an image came into view. The cabin was suddenly plunged into silence, except for the shrieking, wintry wind outside. I leaned close to the screen, confused at what I was looking at. It looked like a live camera feed of a room. As I took in the details, I realized it was my cabin. I saw myself in the chair, leaning close to the screen. I raised my hand, and the miniature version of me on the screen did likewise. Ice water seemed to drip down my spine as waves of dread coursed through my body.
“What the fuck is this?” I whispered, looking back to where the camera should be. It was just a coarse wooden ceiling in that corner. I turned back to the screen and nearly screamed.
The TV showed a pale, naked man crouching directly behind my chair now. With jerky movements, he rose, his broken spine twisting and shivering. A hissing voice rang out from the speakers. It spoke as if it had dirt and writhing maggots in its throat.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death,” it gurgled. “Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
Long, broken fingers with blackened nails reached out to touch my shoulders. I jumped out of the chair, stumbling back as I spun around in terror. My back smashed into the TV, and it fell to the floor with a shattering of glass and an explosion of light.
In those few moments before the darkness descended on me like a blanket, I thought I glimpsed a pale, sunken face with rotted, blackened eyes peeking out from behind the chair.
***
I turned on every light in the cabin, but there was no sign of the Twisted Man now. I knew I had to get out of there, though. I thought about the warning that the voice had spoken. If the creature wanted to attack me, then why hadn’t it just killed me while I was sleeping? None of it made sense. Who was watching me? The Twisted Man? And if he was, why warn me? Perhaps it was psychological warfare, I thought to myself. Perhaps the Twisted Man simply liked to play with his food before he ate it.
Thoughts raced through my head at a thousand miles an hour as I threw on snow pants and a couple heavy sweaters and coats. I covered up my entire body as much as I could to try to prevent frostbite. I had made up my mind to flee. There was no snowstorm tonight, though the entire landscape was blanketed in it and I knew the wind chill would be like an ice blade whipping against my skin. It was extremely dangerous to travel in the middle of the night like this in temperatures that might reach negative thirty degrees. Steve had been right, after all- Alaska had the highest missing persons rate of any state, and many of them were never found, their bodies likely frozen solid in the deep snow dozens of miles from the nearest town.
I grabbed my shotgun, jumped on my snowmobile and started heading to Steve’s cabin. I hoped I could wait there until the sunrise and then figure out what to do next.
But fate would take the decision out of my hands.
***
I felt like there were eyes watching me as I drove along the narrow, winding deer trail. The boughs of the evergreens reached into the path like greedy hands, grabbing at my coat and legs. More than a couple times, I thought I saw a pale, naked figure standing in the snow, but it had always gone when I turned to look.
I gave a sigh of relief when Steve’s place appeared in the distance. I could see the lights twinkling through the small windows of his log cabin. I pulled up next to his door, looking down. I saw two pairs of footprints there, one much smaller than the other. I found it odd, but shrugged it off. The snowmobile cut out with a sucking gurgle.
I knocked on the door hard a few times. Steve appeared after a few moments, groggy and half-dressed. He blinked slowly as he looked me up and down. His wrinkled face fell into a frown.
“Steve, I need a favor,” I said quickly. “Something weird is happening in my cabin. Can I stay here until morning, until maybe I can go to town or something? I can’t stay at my place tonight. I just can’t.” He nodded, yawning and motioning me in.
“You can sleep on the couch, I guess,” Steve said. “Put that shotgun somewhere safe, though, boy.” He had a partitioned bedroom in his cabin. It was significantly larger than my little one-room cabin, though it was basically still just a joint kitchen-living room, a small bedroom and a bathroom. He pointed to a well-worn couch in the corner and gave me an apathetic wave as he stumbled back into his bedroom, slamming the door.
I couldn’t sleep, though. I tiptoed around the room, looking at Steve’s bookshelf. He had a rather strange taste in books- lots of Anne Rule and true crime there. I saw dozens of books about Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Chase, Herbert Mullin, Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez among the collection. At the end, a large, black binder stood, unlabeled and worn-looking. It reminded me of the look of that leather-bound diary for a second, and my heart dropped. But logically, I knew this was just a coincidence. Yet, still, I pulled out the binder, my curiosity piqued.
What I found inside filled me with dread and horror.
Countless news clippings covered the length of it. The first clipping was from nearly twenty years earlier, about a woman who went missing in the Alaskan forest while hiking. A later one confirmed that her body was never found, and that her family was still hoping that she might turn up alive somewhere. A reward was offered for any information, it said.
And every page after that was more of the same: missing woman, murdered prostitute, missing man, no leads. I kept flipping through until I found clippings about Will Lenning’s suicide and the sudden disappearance of his wife. On the article about the suicide, Steve had used red marker to scrawl, “HA HA!” next to it.
I heard the click of a gun being cocked from behind me. I froze as Steve’s voice traveled across the room like a whisper.
“How do you like my work, friend?” he asked, his tone jovial and mocking.
***
I still held the binder of horrors tightly in my hands as I stared open-mouthed at this man I thought I knew.
“It’s you? What, you killed Will Lenning and his wife? And a lot of other women, apparently.” Everything felt unreal, as if I were stuck in a dream. Steve’s grin spread across his face, but his blue eyes stayed cold and dead.
“Yes, well, she was cheating on him with me anyway. Just another whore, you know. They always get what’s coming to them in the end,” he hissed with hatred oozing from his voice. “It’s too bad, really. I just killed another slut tonight. I was planning on saving you for later. The urge isn’t too bad yet right now, after all. It comes in cycles, you see. It comes in waves…” I saw a glimmer of pale, naked flesh writhing behind Steve. With jerky movements, the Twisted Man came up behind him. I said nothing, just watching with wide-eyed horror and amazement.
“You need help, man,” I whispered. Steve laughed.
“Help? The only help they give people like me is a needle in the arm. You know that. That’s why it’s important to always cover your tracks…” The Twisted Man ran a long, broken finger across Steve’s neck. Steve gave a strangled cry and jumped. He spun around, screaming. I glanced over at my shotgun next to the couch.
I jumped for it as Steve turned back to me, firing his pistol twice. The first bullet soared high above me, raining wood splinters down on my head, but the second ripped into my leg. A cold, burning pain ran like fire up my shin. I screamed in agony and battle fury as I gripped the shotgun, spinning and firing.
Steve’s head exploded as the slug ripped through his brain. His forehead collapsed like a smashed melon as bone splinters and blood sprayed the wall behind him.
The Twisted Man stood there, hunched over, grinning up at me. I felt warm blood gushing from my leg as I stared back at him, breathing hard. I wondered if I was dying.
“You… you weren’t after me at all, were you?” I asked. “You were after… Steve.” But the Twisted Man said nothing. After a long moment, he slinked back into the shadows of the bedroom and disappeared.
***
As night crawled its way toward morning, I thought back to the words the Twisted Man had spoken through the TV, suddenly understanding everything.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death. Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
He hadn’t been trying to hurt me at all. He had been trying to warn me. He had probably tried to warn Will Lenning and his wife, too.
I wrapped my leg in gauze, gritting my teeth. The wound looked puckered and deep, but I could still move my foot, and the bullet had gone clean through the flesh. I poured alcohol on it, screaming in pain as it burned its way through my skin. After rummaging through Steve’s bathroom, I found some prescription painkillers and swallowed a handful of them with a beer. I knew I would need the opiate high to get through the pain of riding into town with a mutilated leg.
As the Sun finally rose, I made my way outside the blood-stained floors of the cabin to my snowmobile. Before I left, I glanced back at that horrid place, the scene of so much torment and death.
In the open doorway, the Twisted Man stood, his back hunched, his rotted lips grinning at me. His hand lifted up into the air with jerky movements and waved.
I waved back as I started the engine and headed into town.

A few years ago, I decided I needed a major life change. Everything seemed to be going downhill- my finances, my mental health, my life. I would go weeks without sleeping sometimes as the heavy traffic passed through the city streets down below. Every time I went outside, I saw more homeless people, more needles and crack pipes littering the ground, more muggings and assaults and overdoses and deaths. The city had become a wasteland, and I knew it was time to leave.
I had no girlfriend, no wife, no kids. My parents had both died a few years prior and I barely talked to my siblings anymore. I had nothing to tie me down to this place where I felt like I was dying inside a little more each day.
That was when I sold nearly everything I owned, got in my car and drove up to Alaska to try starting anew. I bought a small cabin and a plot of land in the middle of its majestic mountains and dark, enchanting forests. In the winter, the Northern Lights would shine through like the eyes of God, sending out divine trails of light that danced through the sky in cosmic waves.
And while the move did help give me some peace of mind, in the end, the source of all my problems had ultimately followed me thousands of miles into this endless wilderness. It would take me a long time to realize the cause of all this misery was myself.
Because, as a wise man once said, “Wherever I go, there I am.”
***
I lived in that cabin for three months without any major issues other than the constant threat of bears, moose and wolves. I had a rifle and a shotgun for hunting, a small garden in the backyard and a solar panel to generate electricity.
“This is the life,” I said, relaxing on a hammock I had strung across the corner of the cabin while staring at the endless beauty directly outside the window. White-capped mountains loomed like giants in front of thick clusters of evergreens. A virgin covering of fluffy snow made the entire world glisten and sparkle. There wasn’t a house or road in sight.
“No work, no stress, no pollution, no cars honking all the time…” I closed my eyes, breathing in the clean air. I ended up falling asleep for a couple hours, waking up just as the Sun had started setting. Bright orange streaks mixed with the bloody smears of the fading light as it disappeared behind the mountains.
I groggily arose, stumbling over to make a cup of instant coffee. As I sipped it, I wandered around the room, looking for something to pass the time. There were still quite a few random objects left behind by the last owner that I hadn’t gotten rid of yet. I had moved in to find a stocked bookshelf filled with classics by Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Bored, I started rifling through the collection, looking for something good to pass the time. As I shuffled past “A Maze of Death” and “Ubik”, something caught my eye.
A black, leather-bound book with no title or author name stood there, its cover faded with time and wear. Curious, I pulled it out and opened it. I saw the cursive scrawled across the pages in a neat, copperplate script and realized it was a diary left behind by the previous owner. The first entry was dated “January 9th, 2015.” This is what it said.
***
“I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not. I went into town to talk to my therapist yesterday and she said I should try writing everything down. She talks to me like it’s all in my head. But I know it’s not.
“When I first moved into the cabin, it seemed like Paradise. I never thought in a million years that something would be slinking around at night. I never thought it would be hiding under my bed, peeking in windows and following me like a shadow.
“Right now, I’m snowed in with a cup of coffee in one hand and my pistol in the other. I can’t sleep anymore. I keep hearing something shuffling around under the bed. Sometimes, I think I even hear ragged breathing, as if a corpse with dirt in its lungs had come back to life.
“I’ve caught glimpses of that thing in the darkness. Whatever it is, its skin is loose, almost falling off the bone. It almost looks like a naked, emaciated man. Its eyes are rotted and dark, its back hunched, its spine twisted and jutting out like tumors. It moves in this slow, jerky way, but I can never seem to catch it. Its body seems broken and out of alignment. Its legs bend the wrong way sometimes.
“By the time I turn on the lights or try to take a video of it, it’s always disappeared. But its fetid odor remains. It lingers in the cabin like a sweet-smelling, spreading infection.
“I don’t know what it wants from me. I want to leave, but with the storm raging outside, I’m stuck here, unable to get all the way back to town. The snow surrounds the cabin in mounds five feet high. I feel like a prisoner caged with a rabid beast, not knowing when it will strike.
“My wife claims she hasn’t seen or heard anything, but she keeps vanishing on me. Last night, she disappeared in the middle of a snowstorm. Where did she go? I asked her in the morning, but she said she was here the whole time. She didn’t remember anything. There’s no way she went into town. There wasn’t time and the trails were impassable that far down.
“Something’s going on here, but I don’t know what it is. I’m truly scared for our lives.”
I slammed the diary shut, not wanting to read anymore. I didn’t want to become infected by some kind of contagious cabin fever. If the last owner had gone insane in the mountains and started hallucinating naked corpses crawling around, I really didn’t want to know.
I shoved the diary back in the bookshelf, going for “A Maze of Death” instead. I tried to forget what I had read in the diary as I flew through the novella. All night, I tried to get the image of the naked, twisting man with rotted eyes out of my head, but I couldn’t.
I eventually fell asleep right before dawn. But, as my eyes were closing, I thought I saw a silhouette in the window- a starved man with excited, black eyes that seemed to be rotting out of his skull. I thought I saw him put his inhumanly long fingers against the glass as he leaned forward. I blinked, sitting up and glancing out into the white, snow-covered wonderland.
There was nothing there.
***
Another hunter occasionally followed the deer trails near my cabin. A frozen lake stood a quarter-mile away, the surface white and covered in thick drifts of snow. I bundled up, deciding to go outside for a hike in the frigid dawn. I strapped on my snowshoes and grabbed my shotgun, as I always did when I went outside. I never knew when a polar bear might be waiting around the next tree, after all.
I opened the door, seeing footprints pressed into the snow all around my house. At first, I thought it was that silhouette I had seen, the nightmarish thing from the diary. But the footprints didn’t go over to my window. They followed the trail twenty feet away, veering off towards the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill. I glanced down in that direction, seeing a black figure plodding slowly forward.
“Steve!” I cried, recognizing my only neighbor in a four-mile radius. He had a cabin about a mile away on his own little plot of land. He jumped, clearly startled by the sudden noise. His black snow pants and heavy fur coat swished together as he spun, raising his rifle high. When he saw me, he immediately lowered it and put a gloved hand up in a friendly greeting.
“Hey Josh! Surprised to see you up this early,” he yelled over the muted wintry landscape. Sounds always seemed different after it snowed, as if all the noise in the world had become faded and dead.
“Yeah, I’ve been having a little trouble sleeping,” I said, slinging my shotgun around my shoulder. “What are you doing anyway?”
“Just a little hunting, you know,” he said, giving me a sly wink. “Animals are always most active around dusk and dawn, it seems. That’s when I always have the best luck, anyway.” He stepped close to me, staring me in the eyes. “You do look like shit. Those bags under your eyes are big enough to carry groceries in.”
“Yeah, trust me, I know… Hey, this might sound a little weird, but did you know the previous owner of this cabin?” I asked. Steve’s wrinkled, old face fell into a scowl. His expression immediately became guarded and distant.
“Sure, sure, we met,” he exclaimed bluntly. He seemed to be searching my face for something, but I didn’t know what. His reaction left me feeling off-balance and nervous.
“Is he still around?” I said. Steve’s scowl deepened.
“Buddy, I don’t know what this is about, but he’s dead. He’s been dead. He died in that cabin, actually.” He pointed a finger at my home accusingly. With those words, my heart seemed to drop into my stomach. Waves of dread flowed through my body like water.
“How… how did he die? Like a heart attack or something?” I asked. Steve’s gaze turned downwards. He didn’t meet my eyes.
“Do you know that Alaska has the highest missing persons rate in the entire United States? It’s not even close. In fact, for the population size, we have far more people who go missing and never get found than anywhere else. They even have a name for it: the Alaska Triangle,” Steve said. “And we’re square in the middle of it.” I stared blankly at him, wondering where he was going with this. It seemed like a way to avoid answering my question.
“No, I didn’t know that…” I responded. Steve nodded, raising his head again. He heaved a deep sigh.
“Look, the thing with the last owner and his wife… it’s somewhat disturbing. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you, but it’s certainly not going to help your peace of mind. And it definitely isn’t going to help you get some sleep.”
“I want to know,” I insisted instantly. The wind started to whip past us. Flakes of ice and snow flew sideways in the sudden currents.
“Let’s go back to your cabin then,” Steve said, pulling his heavy fur-lined hood off and shaking out his long, black hair behind him. “I could use a bit of whiskey to warm up.”
***
We sat down with a bottle of Johnny Walker and two shot glasses. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but Steve certainly was. He chugged three shots in the span of a minute. I sipped at mine, drinking half and putting it back down on the coffee table with a thunk. Steve grunted, hissing through his open mouth for a moment.
“Ugh, that’s the good stuff,” he said, slamming his chest as the burning liquor worked its way down. Steve looked up at me with a new sparkle in his eyes. “Huh, so you want to know about what happened to Will Lenning. Well, I’ll tell you that no one really knows the whole story. I used to see him occasionally, come down and have a drink and talk. We all know each other around here, obviously.” I nodded, motioning him on. “He seemed like a normal, upstanding guy. He kinda reminded me of you, actually. A young guy trying to escape the hustle and bustle of the city life, the cancer of the American Dream.
“Well, he was here for maybe a couple months, I don’t know. Everything seemed fine. We used to go skeet shooting occasionally, have a beer, you know. We’d get together with a couple other hunters who live closer to town and sometimes play some poker. I never saw anything odd about Will. I never could have predicted what happened to him.” He heaved a long sigh at this, looking out the window at the sharp mountains with an expression of nostalgia.
“Well, what happened to him?” I asked, encouraging him to go on.
“He started talking about seeing someone peering in through his window at night. He talked about hearing sounds from under his bed while he was laying there in the dark- sounds like diseased breathing and shuffling. He started keeping all the lights on in his cabin twenty-four hours a day.” Steve leaned close to me. A glimmer of fear rippled across his pale, wrinkled face. “He started to lose his mind. Started digging holes all over the place, looking for something. Even in the middle of snowstorms, I would occasionally see him outside, digging. It seemed like he never slept anymore. It was classic cabin fever if I ever saw it.
“It was only a few weeks later that I came over here, concerned. I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, which was fairly unusual. I found the door hanging wide open. Propped up in a chair in the exact spot where you now sit, Will lay with a blast hole showing clear through his skull, a shotgun laying at his feet.
“And next to him, I found a blood-stained diary opened to the middle page. The last entry was stained with blood spatter, but still visible. I remember leaning down and reading it. It was only a few sentences long.” I glanced over at the bookshelf with the same diary, saying nothing.
“It said something like, ‘I see now what’s going on. The Twisted Man is leading me to the truth. Today, I will finally find it.’”
“And that was his suicide note?” I asked, my heart hammering in my chest. He nodded.
“Yeah. I went into town and got some rangers to come check it out. Eventually, they got cops and CSI there. They took all the stuff as evidence, including the diary,” he said. “Good riddance, I say. Reading something like that is never beneficial. Sometimes delusions spread like a virus, you know what I mean?” I did, but I said nothing. I glanced back at the diary, its black leather cover gleaming like a crouching snake.
And I wondered- if the police took the diary as evidence, how did it get back here?
***
“You said he had a wife living here with him, too?” I asked.
“Yeah… she went missing around the same time,” he said. “Pretty bizarre. The cops thought maybe she just moved away, but…” He shook his head grimly. “As far as I know, she was never seen again. It was like she had evaporated into thin air.”
After Steve left, I walked stiffly over to the bookshelf, taking down the diary. I flipped open through the pages. In the middle, I found the last entry. Spatters of old, darkened blood were scattered over the page like raindrops. I found the suicide note and read the date.
“January 27th, 2015,” it read. Will Lenning had not lived long after he started seeing the Twisted Man. I wondered if my fate would be the same.
The Sun had started to set outside as I sat with the diary at the small circular kitchen table, eating some stewed venison and rice as I read through the entries. At the end, Will Lenning said the Twisted Man had been trying to guide him somewhere, that, in fact, the Twisted Man had been trying to protect him from some great evil, rather than being the source of it.
I scoffed, feeling a flash of anger at his stupidity. His naivety obviously led to his death. But then a flash of insight struck me like lightning.
What if I was committing the same kind of stupidity? Perhaps I should just grab my gun and valuables and leave. I could take off on the snowmobile and be in town within a couple hours.
But, in my heart, I knew I would not. Something about the mystery of all this beckoned me to stay. Like a siren leading sailors to destruction, my curiosity called out to me, and I knew I would not be leaving that night. I needed answers.
And, sadly, I would find them.
***
I had fallen asleep with an empty bottle of beer in my hand. I sat in front of the TV, which only got satellite reception. There were, of course, no cable or phone lines threading their way through the forest. All of my power came from stored solar energy. Since I rarely watched TV and really only used it to cook or heat up water for bathing, the energy produced was sufficient even in winter. Tonight, though, I needed its sound, its mindless flashing of light and colors and canned laughter. It seemed to drive away the creeping, suffocating presence like a candle.
I woke suddenly. The TV flashed with static. The repetitive hissing of the white noise spit from the speakers like thousands of snakes. I glanced up at the clock. 3:33 AM. I looked around the dark cabin, confused for a long moment. I didn’t understand what had woken me so abruptly. The satellite had never gone out before, either, even with the howling winds and freezing hail of the Alaskan winter.
The TV started flickering as if the static were rising upwards. Black lines traced their way horizontally across the screen. The hissing deepened into a gurgle, and for a second, I thought I heard faint words behind the white noise. I thought I heard breathing, slow and diseased, like the death gasp of a drowning man.
A black line rose across the TV and an image came into view. The cabin was suddenly plunged into silence, except for the shrieking, wintry wind outside. I leaned close to the screen, confused at what I was looking at. It looked like a live camera feed of a room. As I took in the details, I realized it was my cabin. I saw myself in the chair, leaning close to the screen. I raised my hand, and the miniature version of me on the screen did likewise. Ice water seemed to drip down my spine as waves of dread coursed through my body.
“What the fuck is this?” I whispered, looking back to where the camera should be. It was just a coarse wooden ceiling in that corner. I turned back to the screen and nearly screamed.
The TV showed a pale, naked man crouching directly behind my chair now. With jerky movements, he rose, his broken spine twisting and shivering. A hissing voice rang out from the speakers. It spoke as if it had dirt and writhing maggots in its throat.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death,” it gurgled. “Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
Long, broken fingers with blackened nails reached out to touch my shoulders. I jumped out of the chair, stumbling back as I spun around in terror. My back smashed into the TV, and it fell to the floor with a shattering of glass and an explosion of light.
In those few moments before the darkness descended on me like a blanket, I thought I glimpsed a pale, sunken face with rotted, blackened eyes peeking out from behind the chair.
***
I turned on every light in the cabin, but there was no sign of the Twisted Man now. I knew I had to get out of there, though. I thought about the warning that the voice had spoken. If the creature wanted to attack me, then why hadn’t it just killed me while I was sleeping? None of it made sense. Who was watching me? The Twisted Man? And if he was, why warn me? Perhaps it was psychological warfare, I thought to myself. Perhaps the Twisted Man simply liked to play with his food before he ate it.
Thoughts raced through my head at a thousand miles an hour as I threw on snow pants and a couple heavy sweaters and coats. I covered up my entire body as much as I could to try to prevent frostbite. I had made up my mind to flee. There was no snowstorm tonight, though the entire landscape was blanketed in it and I knew the wind chill would be like an ice blade whipping against my skin. It was extremely dangerous to travel in the middle of the night like this in temperatures that might reach negative thirty degrees. Steve had been right, after all- Alaska had the highest missing persons rate of any state, and many of them were never found, their bodies likely frozen solid in the deep snow dozens of miles from the nearest town.
I grabbed my shotgun, jumped on my snowmobile and started heading to Steve’s cabin. I hoped I could wait there until the sunrise and then figure out what to do next.
But fate would take the decision out of my hands.
***
I felt like there were eyes watching me as I drove along the narrow, winding deer trail. The boughs of the evergreens reached into the path like greedy hands, grabbing at my coat and legs. More than a couple times, I thought I saw a pale, naked figure standing in the snow, but it had always gone when I turned to look.
I gave a sigh of relief when Steve’s place appeared in the distance. I could see the lights twinkling through the small windows of his log cabin. I pulled up next to his door, looking down. I saw two pairs of footprints there, one much smaller than the other. I found it odd, but shrugged it off. The snowmobile cut out with a sucking gurgle.
I knocked on the door hard a few times. Steve appeared after a few moments, groggy and half-dressed. He blinked slowly as he looked me up and down. His wrinkled face fell into a frown.
“Steve, I need a favor,” I said quickly. “Something weird is happening in my cabin. Can I stay here until morning, until maybe I can go to town or something? I can’t stay at my place tonight. I just can’t.” He nodded, yawning and motioning me in.
“You can sleep on the couch, I guess,” Steve said. “Put that shotgun somewhere safe, though, boy.” He had a partitioned bedroom in his cabin. It was significantly larger than my little one-room cabin, though it was basically still just a joint kitchen-living room, a small bedroom and a bathroom. He pointed to a well-worn couch in the corner and gave me an apathetic wave as he stumbled back into his bedroom, slamming the door.
I couldn’t sleep, though. I tiptoed around the room, looking at Steve’s bookshelf. He had a rather strange taste in books- lots of Anne Rule and true crime there. I saw dozens of books about Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Chase, Herbert Mullin, Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez among the collection. At the end, a large, black binder stood, unlabeled and worn-looking. It reminded me of the look of that leather-bound diary for a second, and my heart dropped. But logically, I knew this was just a coincidence. Yet, still, I pulled out the binder, my curiosity piqued.
What I found inside filled me with dread and horror.
Countless news clippings covered the length of it. The first clipping was from nearly twenty years earlier, about a woman who went missing in the Alaskan forest while hiking. A later one confirmed that her body was never found, and that her family was still hoping that she might turn up alive somewhere. A reward was offered for any information, it said.
And every page after that was more of the same: missing woman, murdered prostitute, missing man, no leads. I kept flipping through until I found clippings about Will Lenning’s suicide and the sudden disappearance of his wife. On the article about the suicide, Steve had used red marker to scrawl, “HA HA!” next to it.
I heard the click of a gun being cocked from behind me. I froze as Steve’s voice traveled across the room like a whisper.
“How do you like my work, friend?” he asked, his tone jovial and mocking.
***
I still held the binder of horrors tightly in my hands as I stared open-mouthed at this man I thought I knew.
“It’s you? What, you killed Will Lenning and his wife? And a lot of other women, apparently.” Everything felt unreal, as if I were stuck in a dream. Steve’s grin spread across his face, but his blue eyes stayed cold and dead.
“Yes, well, she was cheating on him with me anyway. Just another whore, you know. They always get what’s coming to them in the end,” he hissed with hatred oozing from his voice. “It’s too bad, really. I just killed another slut tonight. I was planning on saving you for later. The urge isn’t too bad yet right now, after all. It comes in cycles, you see. It comes in waves…” I saw a glimmer of pale, naked flesh writhing behind Steve. With jerky movements, the Twisted Man came up behind him. I said nothing, just watching with wide-eyed horror and amazement.
“You need help, man,” I whispered. Steve laughed.
“Help? The only help they give people like me is a needle in the arm. You know that. That’s why it’s important to always cover your tracks…” The Twisted Man ran a long, broken finger across Steve’s neck. Steve gave a strangled cry and jumped. He spun around, screaming. I glanced over at my shotgun next to the couch.
I jumped for it as Steve turned back to me, firing his pistol twice. The first bullet soared high above me, raining wood splinters down on my head, but the second ripped into my leg. A cold, burning pain ran like fire up my shin. I screamed in agony and battle fury as I gripped the shotgun, spinning and firing.
Steve’s head exploded as the slug ripped through his brain. His forehead collapsed like a smashed melon as bone splinters and blood sprayed the wall behind him.
The Twisted Man stood there, hunched over, grinning up at me. I felt warm blood gushing from my leg as I stared back at him, breathing hard. I wondered if I was dying.
“You… you weren’t after me at all, were you?” I asked. “You were after… Steve.” But the Twisted Man said nothing. After a long moment, he slinked back into the shadows of the bedroom and disappeared.
***
As night crawled its way toward morning, I thought back to the words the Twisted Man had spoken through the TV, suddenly understanding everything.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death. Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
He hadn’t been trying to hurt me at all. He had been trying to warn me. He had probably tried to warn Will Lenning and his wife, too.
I wrapped my leg in gauze, gritting my teeth. The wound looked puckered and deep, but I could still move my foot, and the bullet had gone clean through the flesh. I poured alcohol on it, screaming in pain as it burned its way through my skin. After rummaging through Steve’s bathroom, I found some prescription painkillers and swallowed a handful of them with a beer. I knew I would need the opiate high to get through the pain of riding into town with a mutilated leg.
As the Sun finally rose, I made my way outside the blood-stained floors of the cabin to my snowmobile. Before I left, I glanced back at that horrid place, the scene of so much torment and death.
In the open doorway, the Twisted Man stood, his back hunched, his rotted lips grinning at me. His hand lifted up into the air with jerky movements and waved.
I waved back as I started the engine and headed into town.

A few years ago, I decided I needed a major life change. Everything seemed to be going downhill- my finances, my mental health, my life. I would go weeks without sleeping sometimes as the heavy traffic passed through the city streets down below. Every time I went outside, I saw more homeless people, more needles and crack pipes littering the ground, more muggings and assaults and overdoses and deaths. The city had become a wasteland, and I knew it was time to leave.
I had no girlfriend, no wife, no kids. My parents had both died a few years prior and I barely talked to my siblings anymore. I had nothing to tie me down to this place where I felt like I was dying inside a little more each day.
That was when I sold nearly everything I owned, got in my car and drove up to Alaska to try starting anew. I bought a small cabin and a plot of land in the middle of its majestic mountains and dark, enchanting forests. In the winter, the Northern Lights would shine through like the eyes of God, sending out divine trails of light that danced through the sky in cosmic waves.
And while the move did help give me some peace of mind, in the end, the source of all my problems had ultimately followed me thousands of miles into this endless wilderness. It would take me a long time to realize the cause of all this misery was myself.
Because, as a wise man once said, “Wherever I go, there I am.”
***
I lived in that cabin for three months without any major issues other than the constant threat of bears, moose and wolves. I had a rifle and a shotgun for hunting, a small garden in the backyard and a solar panel to generate electricity.
“This is the life,” I said, relaxing on a hammock I had strung across the corner of the cabin while staring at the endless beauty directly outside the window. White-capped mountains loomed like giants in front of thick clusters of evergreens. A virgin covering of fluffy snow made the entire world glisten and sparkle. There wasn’t a house or road in sight.
“No work, no stress, no pollution, no cars honking all the time…” I closed my eyes, breathing in the clean air. I ended up falling asleep for a couple hours, waking up just as the Sun had started setting. Bright orange streaks mixed with the bloody smears of the fading light as it disappeared behind the mountains.
I groggily arose, stumbling over to make a cup of instant coffee. As I sipped it, I wandered around the room, looking for something to pass the time. There were still quite a few random objects left behind by the last owner that I hadn’t gotten rid of yet. I had moved in to find a stocked bookshelf filled with classics by Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Bored, I started rifling through the collection, looking for something good to pass the time. As I shuffled past “A Maze of Death” and “Ubik”, something caught my eye.
A black, leather-bound book with no title or author name stood there, its cover faded with time and wear. Curious, I pulled it out and opened it. I saw the cursive scrawled across the pages in a neat, copperplate script and realized it was a diary left behind by the previous owner. The first entry was dated “January 9th, 2015.” This is what it said.
***
“I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not. I went into town to talk to my therapist yesterday and she said I should try writing everything down. She talks to me like it’s all in my head. But I know it’s not.
“When I first moved into the cabin, it seemed like Paradise. I never thought in a million years that something would be slinking around at night. I never thought it would be hiding under my bed, peeking in windows and following me like a shadow.
“Right now, I’m snowed in with a cup of coffee in one hand and my pistol in the other. I can’t sleep anymore. I keep hearing something shuffling around under the bed. Sometimes, I think I even hear ragged breathing, as if a corpse with dirt in its lungs had come back to life.
“I’ve caught glimpses of that thing in the darkness. Whatever it is, its skin is loose, almost falling off the bone. It almost looks like a naked, emaciated man. Its eyes are rotted and dark, its back hunched, its spine twisted and jutting out like tumors. It moves in this slow, jerky way, but I can never seem to catch it. Its body seems broken and out of alignment. Its legs bend the wrong way sometimes.
“By the time I turn on the lights or try to take a video of it, it’s always disappeared. But its fetid odor remains. It lingers in the cabin like a sweet-smelling, spreading infection.
“I don’t know what it wants from me. I want to leave, but with the storm raging outside, I’m stuck here, unable to get all the way back to town. The snow surrounds the cabin in mounds five feet high. I feel like a prisoner caged with a rabid beast, not knowing when it will strike.
“My wife claims she hasn’t seen or heard anything, but she keeps vanishing on me. Last night, she disappeared in the middle of a snowstorm. Where did she go? I asked her in the morning, but she said she was here the whole time. She didn’t remember anything. There’s no way she went into town. There wasn’t time and the trails were impassable that far down.
“Something’s going on here, but I don’t know what it is. I’m truly scared for our lives.”
I slammed the diary shut, not wanting to read anymore. I didn’t want to become infected by some kind of contagious cabin fever. If the last owner had gone insane in the mountains and started hallucinating naked corpses crawling around, I really didn’t want to know.
I shoved the diary back in the bookshelf, going for “A Maze of Death” instead. I tried to forget what I had read in the diary as I flew through the novella. All night, I tried to get the image of the naked, twisting man with rotted eyes out of my head, but I couldn’t.
I eventually fell asleep right before dawn. But, as my eyes were closing, I thought I saw a silhouette in the window- a starved man with excited, black eyes that seemed to be rotting out of his skull. I thought I saw him put his inhumanly long fingers against the glass as he leaned forward. I blinked, sitting up and glancing out into the white, snow-covered wonderland.
There was nothing there.
***
Another hunter occasionally followed the deer trails near my cabin. A frozen lake stood a quarter-mile away, the surface white and covered in thick drifts of snow. I bundled up, deciding to go outside for a hike in the frigid dawn. I strapped on my snowshoes and grabbed my shotgun, as I always did when I went outside. I never knew when a polar bear might be waiting around the next tree, after all.
I opened the door, seeing footprints pressed into the snow all around my house. At first, I thought it was that silhouette I had seen, the nightmarish thing from the diary. But the footprints didn’t go over to my window. They followed the trail twenty feet away, veering off towards the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill. I glanced down in that direction, seeing a black figure plodding slowly forward.
“Steve!” I cried, recognizing my only neighbor in a four-mile radius. He had a cabin about a mile away on his own little plot of land. He jumped, clearly startled by the sudden noise. His black snow pants and heavy fur coat swished together as he spun, raising his rifle high. When he saw me, he immediately lowered it and put a gloved hand up in a friendly greeting.
“Hey Josh! Surprised to see you up this early,” he yelled over the muted wintry landscape. Sounds always seemed different after it snowed, as if all the noise in the world had become faded and dead.
“Yeah, I’ve been having a little trouble sleeping,” I said, slinging my shotgun around my shoulder. “What are you doing anyway?”
“Just a little hunting, you know,” he said, giving me a sly wink. “Animals are always most active around dusk and dawn, it seems. That’s when I always have the best luck, anyway.” He stepped close to me, staring me in the eyes. “You do look like shit. Those bags under your eyes are big enough to carry groceries in.”
“Yeah, trust me, I know… Hey, this might sound a little weird, but did you know the previous owner of this cabin?” I asked. Steve’s wrinkled, old face fell into a scowl. His expression immediately became guarded and distant.
“Sure, sure, we met,” he exclaimed bluntly. He seemed to be searching my face for something, but I didn’t know what. His reaction left me feeling off-balance and nervous.
“Is he still around?” I said. Steve’s scowl deepened.
“Buddy, I don’t know what this is about, but he’s dead. He’s been dead. He died in that cabin, actually.” He pointed a finger at my home accusingly. With those words, my heart seemed to drop into my stomach. Waves of dread flowed through my body like water.
“How… how did he die? Like a heart attack or something?” I asked. Steve’s gaze turned downwards. He didn’t meet my eyes.
“Do you know that Alaska has the highest missing persons rate in the entire United States? It’s not even close. In fact, for the population size, we have far more people who go missing and never get found than anywhere else. They even have a name for it: the Alaska Triangle,” Steve said. “And we’re square in the middle of it.” I stared blankly at him, wondering where he was going with this. It seemed like a way to avoid answering my question.
“No, I didn’t know that…” I responded. Steve nodded, raising his head again. He heaved a deep sigh.
“Look, the thing with the last owner and his wife… it’s somewhat disturbing. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you, but it’s certainly not going to help your peace of mind. And it definitely isn’t going to help you get some sleep.”
“I want to know,” I insisted instantly. The wind started to whip past us. Flakes of ice and snow flew sideways in the sudden currents.
“Let’s go back to your cabin then,” Steve said, pulling his heavy fur-lined hood off and shaking out his long, black hair behind him. “I could use a bit of whiskey to warm up.”
***
We sat down with a bottle of Johnny Walker and two shot glasses. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but Steve certainly was. He chugged three shots in the span of a minute. I sipped at mine, drinking half and putting it back down on the coffee table with a thunk. Steve grunted, hissing through his open mouth for a moment.
“Ugh, that’s the good stuff,” he said, slamming his chest as the burning liquor worked its way down. Steve looked up at me with a new sparkle in his eyes. “Huh, so you want to know about what happened to Will Lenning. Well, I’ll tell you that no one really knows the whole story. I used to see him occasionally, come down and have a drink and talk. We all know each other around here, obviously.” I nodded, motioning him on. “He seemed like a normal, upstanding guy. He kinda reminded me of you, actually. A young guy trying to escape the hustle and bustle of the city life, the cancer of the American Dream.
“Well, he was here for maybe a couple months, I don’t know. Everything seemed fine. We used to go skeet shooting occasionally, have a beer, you know. We’d get together with a couple other hunters who live closer to town and sometimes play some poker. I never saw anything odd about Will. I never could have predicted what happened to him.” He heaved a long sigh at this, looking out the window at the sharp mountains with an expression of nostalgia.
“Well, what happened to him?” I asked, encouraging him to go on.
“He started talking about seeing someone peering in through his window at night. He talked about hearing sounds from under his bed while he was laying there in the dark- sounds like diseased breathing and shuffling. He started keeping all the lights on in his cabin twenty-four hours a day.” Steve leaned close to me. A glimmer of fear rippled across his pale, wrinkled face. “He started to lose his mind. Started digging holes all over the place, looking for something. Even in the middle of snowstorms, I would occasionally see him outside, digging. It seemed like he never slept anymore. It was classic cabin fever if I ever saw it.
“It was only a few weeks later that I came over here, concerned. I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, which was fairly unusual. I found the door hanging wide open. Propped up in a chair in the exact spot where you now sit, Will lay with a blast hole showing clear through his skull, a shotgun laying at his feet.
“And next to him, I found a blood-stained diary opened to the middle page. The last entry was stained with blood spatter, but still visible. I remember leaning down and reading it. It was only a few sentences long.” I glanced over at the bookshelf with the same diary, saying nothing.
“It said something like, ‘I see now what’s going on. The Twisted Man is leading me to the truth. Today, I will finally find it.’”
“And that was his suicide note?” I asked, my heart hammering in my chest. He nodded.
“Yeah. I went into town and got some rangers to come check it out. Eventually, they got cops and CSI there. They took all the stuff as evidence, including the diary,” he said. “Good riddance, I say. Reading something like that is never beneficial. Sometimes delusions spread like a virus, you know what I mean?” I did, but I said nothing. I glanced back at the diary, its black leather cover gleaming like a crouching snake.
And I wondered- if the police took the diary as evidence, how did it get back here?
***
“You said he had a wife living here with him, too?” I asked.
“Yeah… she went missing around the same time,” he said. “Pretty bizarre. The cops thought maybe she just moved away, but…” He shook his head grimly. “As far as I know, she was never seen again. It was like she had evaporated into thin air.”
After Steve left, I walked stiffly over to the bookshelf, taking down the diary. I flipped open through the pages. In the middle, I found the last entry. Spatters of old, darkened blood were scattered over the page like raindrops. I found the suicide note and read the date.
“January 27th, 2015,” it read. Will Lenning had not lived long after he started seeing the Twisted Man. I wondered if my fate would be the same.
The Sun had started to set outside as I sat with the diary at the small circular kitchen table, eating some stewed venison and rice as I read through the entries. At the end, Will Lenning said the Twisted Man had been trying to guide him somewhere, that, in fact, the Twisted Man had been trying to protect him from some great evil, rather than being the source of it.
I scoffed, feeling a flash of anger at his stupidity. His naivety obviously led to his death. But then a flash of insight struck me like lightning.
What if I was committing the same kind of stupidity? Perhaps I should just grab my gun and valuables and leave. I could take off on the snowmobile and be in town within a couple hours.
But, in my heart, I knew I would not. Something about the mystery of all this beckoned me to stay. Like a siren leading sailors to destruction, my curiosity called out to me, and I knew I would not be leaving that night. I needed answers.
And, sadly, I would find them.
***
I had fallen asleep with an empty bottle of beer in my hand. I sat in front of the TV, which only got satellite reception. There were, of course, no cable or phone lines threading their way through the forest. All of my power came from stored solar energy. Since I rarely watched TV and really only used it to cook or heat up water for bathing, the energy produced was sufficient even in winter. Tonight, though, I needed its sound, its mindless flashing of light and colors and canned laughter. It seemed to drive away the creeping, suffocating presence like a candle.
I woke suddenly. The TV flashed with static. The repetitive hissing of the white noise spit from the speakers like thousands of snakes. I glanced up at the clock. 3:33 AM. I looked around the dark cabin, confused for a long moment. I didn’t understand what had woken me so abruptly. The satellite had never gone out before, either, even with the howling winds and freezing hail of the Alaskan winter.
The TV started flickering as if the static were rising upwards. Black lines traced their way horizontally across the screen. The hissing deepened into a gurgle, and for a second, I thought I heard faint words behind the white noise. I thought I heard breathing, slow and diseased, like the death gasp of a drowning man.
A black line rose across the TV and an image came into view. The cabin was suddenly plunged into silence, except for the shrieking, wintry wind outside. I leaned close to the screen, confused at what I was looking at. It looked like a live camera feed of a room. As I took in the details, I realized it was my cabin. I saw myself in the chair, leaning close to the screen. I raised my hand, and the miniature version of me on the screen did likewise. Ice water seemed to drip down my spine as waves of dread coursed through my body.
“What the fuck is this?” I whispered, looking back to where the camera should be. It was just a coarse wooden ceiling in that corner. I turned back to the screen and nearly screamed.
The TV showed a pale, naked man crouching directly behind my chair now. With jerky movements, he rose, his broken spine twisting and shivering. A hissing voice rang out from the speakers. It spoke as if it had dirt and writhing maggots in its throat.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death,” it gurgled. “Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
Long, broken fingers with blackened nails reached out to touch my shoulders. I jumped out of the chair, stumbling back as I spun around in terror. My back smashed into the TV, and it fell to the floor with a shattering of glass and an explosion of light.
In those few moments before the darkness descended on me like a blanket, I thought I glimpsed a pale, sunken face with rotted, blackened eyes peeking out from behind the chair.
***
I turned on every light in the cabin, but there was no sign of the Twisted Man now. I knew I had to get out of there, though. I thought about the warning that the voice had spoken. If the creature wanted to attack me, then why hadn’t it just killed me while I was sleeping? None of it made sense. Who was watching me? The Twisted Man? And if he was, why warn me? Perhaps it was psychological warfare, I thought to myself. Perhaps the Twisted Man simply liked to play with his food before he ate it.
Thoughts raced through my head at a thousand miles an hour as I threw on snow pants and a couple heavy sweaters and coats. I covered up my entire body as much as I could to try to prevent frostbite. I had made up my mind to flee. There was no snowstorm tonight, though the entire landscape was blanketed in it and I knew the wind chill would be like an ice blade whipping against my skin. It was extremely dangerous to travel in the middle of the night like this in temperatures that might reach negative thirty degrees. Steve had been right, after all- Alaska had the highest missing persons rate of any state, and many of them were never found, their bodies likely frozen solid in the deep snow dozens of miles from the nearest town.
I grabbed my shotgun, jumped on my snowmobile and started heading to Steve’s cabin. I hoped I could wait there until the sunrise and then figure out what to do next.
But fate would take the decision out of my hands.
***
I felt like there were eyes watching me as I drove along the narrow, winding deer trail. The boughs of the evergreens reached into the path like greedy hands, grabbing at my coat and legs. More than a couple times, I thought I saw a pale, naked figure standing in the snow, but it had always gone when I turned to look.
I gave a sigh of relief when Steve’s place appeared in the distance. I could see the lights twinkling through the small windows of his log cabin. I pulled up next to his door, looking down. I saw two pairs of footprints there, one much smaller than the other. I found it odd, but shrugged it off. The snowmobile cut out with a sucking gurgle.
I knocked on the door hard a few times. Steve appeared after a few moments, groggy and half-dressed. He blinked slowly as he looked me up and down. His wrinkled face fell into a frown.
“Steve, I need a favor,” I said quickly. “Something weird is happening in my cabin. Can I stay here until morning, until maybe I can go to town or something? I can’t stay at my place tonight. I just can’t.” He nodded, yawning and motioning me in.
“You can sleep on the couch, I guess,” Steve said. “Put that shotgun somewhere safe, though, boy.” He had a partitioned bedroom in his cabin. It was significantly larger than my little one-room cabin, though it was basically still just a joint kitchen-living room, a small bedroom and a bathroom. He pointed to a well-worn couch in the corner and gave me an apathetic wave as he stumbled back into his bedroom, slamming the door.
I couldn’t sleep, though. I tiptoed around the room, looking at Steve’s bookshelf. He had a rather strange taste in books- lots of Anne Rule and true crime there. I saw dozens of books about Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Chase, Herbert Mullin, Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez among the collection. At the end, a large, black binder stood, unlabeled and worn-looking. It reminded me of the look of that leather-bound diary for a second, and my heart dropped. But logically, I knew this was just a coincidence. Yet, still, I pulled out the binder, my curiosity piqued.
What I found inside filled me with dread and horror.
Countless news clippings covered the length of it. The first clipping was from nearly twenty years earlier, about a woman who went missing in the Alaskan forest while hiking. A later one confirmed that her body was never found, and that her family was still hoping that she might turn up alive somewhere. A reward was offered for any information, it said.
And every page after that was more of the same: missing woman, murdered prostitute, missing man, no leads. I kept flipping through until I found clippings about Will Lenning’s suicide and the sudden disappearance of his wife. On the article about the suicide, Steve had used red marker to scrawl, “HA HA!” next to it.
I heard the click of a gun being cocked from behind me. I froze as Steve’s voice traveled across the room like a whisper.
“How do you like my work, friend?” he asked, his tone jovial and mocking.
***
I still held the binder of horrors tightly in my hands as I stared open-mouthed at this man I thought I knew.
“It’s you? What, you killed Will Lenning and his wife? And a lot of other women, apparently.” Everything felt unreal, as if I were stuck in a dream. Steve’s grin spread across his face, but his blue eyes stayed cold and dead.
“Yes, well, she was cheating on him with me anyway. Just another whore, you know. They always get what’s coming to them in the end,” he hissed with hatred oozing from his voice. “It’s too bad, really. I just killed another slut tonight. I was planning on saving you for later. The urge isn’t too bad yet right now, after all. It comes in cycles, you see. It comes in waves…” I saw a glimmer of pale, naked flesh writhing behind Steve. With jerky movements, the Twisted Man came up behind him. I said nothing, just watching with wide-eyed horror and amazement.
“You need help, man,” I whispered. Steve laughed.
“Help? The only help they give people like me is a needle in the arm. You know that. That’s why it’s important to always cover your tracks…” The Twisted Man ran a long, broken finger across Steve’s neck. Steve gave a strangled cry and jumped. He spun around, screaming. I glanced over at my shotgun next to the couch.
I jumped for it as Steve turned back to me, firing his pistol twice. The first bullet soared high above me, raining wood splinters down on my head, but the second ripped into my leg. A cold, burning pain ran like fire up my shin. I screamed in agony and battle fury as I gripped the shotgun, spinning and firing.
Steve’s head exploded as the slug ripped through his brain. His forehead collapsed like a smashed melon as bone splinters and blood sprayed the wall behind him.
The Twisted Man stood there, hunched over, grinning up at me. I felt warm blood gushing from my leg as I stared back at him, breathing hard. I wondered if I was dying.
“You… you weren’t after me at all, were you?” I asked. “You were after… Steve.” But the Twisted Man said nothing. After a long moment, he slinked back into the shadows of the bedroom and disappeared.
***
As night crawled its way toward morning, I thought back to the words the Twisted Man had spoken through the TV, suddenly understanding everything.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death. Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
He hadn’t been trying to hurt me at all. He had been trying to warn me. He had probably tried to warn Will Lenning and his wife, too.
I wrapped my leg in gauze, gritting my teeth. The wound looked puckered and deep, but I could still move my foot, and the bullet had gone clean through the flesh. I poured alcohol on it, screaming in pain as it burned its way through my skin. After rummaging through Steve’s bathroom, I found some prescription painkillers and swallowed a handful of them with a beer. I knew I would need the opiate high to get through the pain of riding into town with a mutilated leg.
As the Sun finally rose, I made my way outside the blood-stained floors of the cabin to my snowmobile. Before I left, I glanced back at that horrid place, the scene of so much torment and death.
In the open doorway, the Twisted Man stood, his back hunched, his rotted lips grinning at me. His hand lifted up into the air with jerky movements and waved.
I waved back as I started the engine and headed into town.

On the arctic frontier, at the border between the mountains and the wastes beyond, looms Castle Thar-Gannon. For centuries, the Skull God ruled his domain from his blackened throne. But 20 years have passed since the routing of his armies, and now the castle lies abandoned with riches unclaimed. Yet, death still lurks in the shadows of the ruins. An ancient doom arises from the depths of this place...
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\"The Underworld of Malgorgia,\" by Billy Longino.

A few years ago, I decided I needed a major life change. Everything seemed to be going downhill- my finances, my mental health, my life. I would go weeks without sleeping sometimes as the heavy traffic passed through the city streets down below. Every time I went outside, I saw more homeless people, more needles and crack pipes littering the ground, more muggings and assaults and overdoses and deaths. The city had become a wasteland, and I knew it was time to leave.
I had no girlfriend, no wife, no kids. My parents had both died a few years prior and I barely talked to my siblings anymore. I had nothing to tie me down to this place where I felt like I was dying inside a little more each day.
That was when I sold nearly everything I owned, got in my car and drove up to Alaska to try starting anew. I bought a small cabin and a plot of land in the middle of its majestic mountains and dark, enchanting forests. In the winter, the Northern Lights would shine through like the eyes of God, sending out divine trails of light that danced through the sky in cosmic waves.
And while the move did help give me some peace of mind, in the end, the source of all my problems had ultimately followed me thousands of miles into this endless wilderness. It would take me a long time to realize the cause of all this misery was myself.
Because, as a wise man once said, “Wherever I go, there I am.”
***
I lived in that cabin for three months without any major issues other than the constant threat of bears, moose and wolves. I had a rifle and a shotgun for hunting, a small garden in the backyard and a solar panel to generate electricity.
“This is the life,” I said, relaxing on a hammock I had strung across the corner of the cabin while staring at the endless beauty directly outside the window. White-capped mountains loomed like giants in front of thick clusters of evergreens. A virgin covering of fluffy snow made the entire world glisten and sparkle. There wasn’t a house or road in sight.
“No work, no stress, no pollution, no cars honking all the time…” I closed my eyes, breathing in the clean air. I ended up falling asleep for a couple hours, waking up just as the Sun had started setting. Bright orange streaks mixed with the bloody smears of the fading light as it disappeared behind the mountains.
I groggily arose, stumbling over to make a cup of instant coffee. As I sipped it, I wandered around the room, looking for something to pass the time. There were still quite a few random objects left behind by the last owner that I hadn’t gotten rid of yet. I had moved in to find a stocked bookshelf filled with classics by Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Bored, I started rifling through the collection, looking for something good to pass the time. As I shuffled past “A Maze of Death” and “Ubik”, something caught my eye.
A black, leather-bound book with no title or author name stood there, its cover faded with time and wear. Curious, I pulled it out and opened it. I saw the cursive scrawled across the pages in a neat, copperplate script and realized it was a diary left behind by the previous owner. The first entry was dated “January 9th, 2015.” This is what it said.
***
“I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not. I went into town to talk to my therapist yesterday and she said I should try writing everything down. She talks to me like it’s all in my head. But I know it’s not.
“When I first moved into the cabin, it seemed like Paradise. I never thought in a million years that something would be slinking around at night. I never thought it would be hiding under my bed, peeking in windows and following me like a shadow.
“Right now, I’m snowed in with a cup of coffee in one hand and my pistol in the other. I can’t sleep anymore. I keep hearing something shuffling around under the bed. Sometimes, I think I even hear ragged breathing, as if a corpse with dirt in its lungs had come back to life.
“I’ve caught glimpses of that thing in the darkness. Whatever it is, its skin is loose, almost falling off the bone. It almost looks like a naked, emaciated man. Its eyes are rotted and dark, its back hunched, its spine twisted and jutting out like tumors. It moves in this slow, jerky way, but I can never seem to catch it. Its body seems broken and out of alignment. Its legs bend the wrong way sometimes.
“By the time I turn on the lights or try to take a video of it, it’s always disappeared. But its fetid odor remains. It lingers in the cabin like a sweet-smelling, spreading infection.
“I don’t know what it wants from me. I want to leave, but with the storm raging outside, I’m stuck here, unable to get all the way back to town. The snow surrounds the cabin in mounds five feet high. I feel like a prisoner caged with a rabid beast, not knowing when it will strike.
“My wife claims she hasn’t seen or heard anything, but she keeps vanishing on me. Last night, she disappeared in the middle of a snowstorm. Where did she go? I asked her in the morning, but she said she was here the whole time. She didn’t remember anything. There’s no way she went into town. There wasn’t time and the trails were impassable that far down.
“Something’s going on here, but I don’t know what it is. I’m truly scared for our lives.”
I slammed the diary shut, not wanting to read anymore. I didn’t want to become infected by some kind of contagious cabin fever. If the last owner had gone insane in the mountains and started hallucinating naked corpses crawling around, I really didn’t want to know.
I shoved the diary back in the bookshelf, going for “A Maze of Death” instead. I tried to forget what I had read in the diary as I flew through the novella. All night, I tried to get the image of the naked, twisting man with rotted eyes out of my head, but I couldn’t.
I eventually fell asleep right before dawn. But, as my eyes were closing, I thought I saw a silhouette in the window- a starved man with excited, black eyes that seemed to be rotting out of his skull. I thought I saw him put his inhumanly long fingers against the glass as he leaned forward. I blinked, sitting up and glancing out into the white, snow-covered wonderland.
There was nothing there.
***
Another hunter occasionally followed the deer trails near my cabin. A frozen lake stood a quarter-mile away, the surface white and covered in thick drifts of snow. I bundled up, deciding to go outside for a hike in the frigid dawn. I strapped on my snowshoes and grabbed my shotgun, as I always did when I went outside. I never knew when a polar bear might be waiting around the next tree, after all.
I opened the door, seeing footprints pressed into the snow all around my house. At first, I thought it was that silhouette I had seen, the nightmarish thing from the diary. But the footprints didn’t go over to my window. They followed the trail twenty feet away, veering off towards the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill. I glanced down in that direction, seeing a black figure plodding slowly forward.
“Steve!” I cried, recognizing my only neighbor in a four-mile radius. He had a cabin about a mile away on his own little plot of land. He jumped, clearly startled by the sudden noise. His black snow pants and heavy fur coat swished together as he spun, raising his rifle high. When he saw me, he immediately lowered it and put a gloved hand up in a friendly greeting.
“Hey Josh! Surprised to see you up this early,” he yelled over the muted wintry landscape. Sounds always seemed different after it snowed, as if all the noise in the world had become faded and dead.
“Yeah, I’ve been having a little trouble sleeping,” I said, slinging my shotgun around my shoulder. “What are you doing anyway?”
“Just a little hunting, you know,” he said, giving me a sly wink. “Animals are always most active around dusk and dawn, it seems. That’s when I always have the best luck, anyway.” He stepped close to me, staring me in the eyes. “You do look like shit. Those bags under your eyes are big enough to carry groceries in.”
“Yeah, trust me, I know… Hey, this might sound a little weird, but did you know the previous owner of this cabin?” I asked. Steve’s wrinkled, old face fell into a scowl. His expression immediately became guarded and distant.
“Sure, sure, we met,” he exclaimed bluntly. He seemed to be searching my face for something, but I didn’t know what. His reaction left me feeling off-balance and nervous.
“Is he still around?” I said. Steve’s scowl deepened.
“Buddy, I don’t know what this is about, but he’s dead. He’s been dead. He died in that cabin, actually.” He pointed a finger at my home accusingly. With those words, my heart seemed to drop into my stomach. Waves of dread flowed through my body like water.
“How… how did he die? Like a heart attack or something?” I asked. Steve’s gaze turned downwards. He didn’t meet my eyes.
“Do you know that Alaska has the highest missing persons rate in the entire United States? It’s not even close. In fact, for the population size, we have far more people who go missing and never get found than anywhere else. They even have a name for it: the Alaska Triangle,” Steve said. “And we’re square in the middle of it.” I stared blankly at him, wondering where he was going with this. It seemed like a way to avoid answering my question.
“No, I didn’t know that…” I responded. Steve nodded, raising his head again. He heaved a deep sigh.
“Look, the thing with the last owner and his wife… it’s somewhat disturbing. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you, but it’s certainly not going to help your peace of mind. And it definitely isn’t going to help you get some sleep.”
“I want to know,” I insisted instantly. The wind started to whip past us. Flakes of ice and snow flew sideways in the sudden currents.
“Let’s go back to your cabin then,” Steve said, pulling his heavy fur-lined hood off and shaking out his long, black hair behind him. “I could use a bit of whiskey to warm up.”
***
We sat down with a bottle of Johnny Walker and two shot glasses. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but Steve certainly was. He chugged three shots in the span of a minute. I sipped at mine, drinking half and putting it back down on the coffee table with a thunk. Steve grunted, hissing through his open mouth for a moment.
“Ugh, that’s the good stuff,” he said, slamming his chest as the burning liquor worked its way down. Steve looked up at me with a new sparkle in his eyes. “Huh, so you want to know about what happened to Will Lenning. Well, I’ll tell you that no one really knows the whole story. I used to see him occasionally, come down and have a drink and talk. We all know each other around here, obviously.” I nodded, motioning him on. “He seemed like a normal, upstanding guy. He kinda reminded me of you, actually. A young guy trying to escape the hustle and bustle of the city life, the cancer of the American Dream.
“Well, he was here for maybe a couple months, I don’t know. Everything seemed fine. We used to go skeet shooting occasionally, have a beer, you know. We’d get together with a couple other hunters who live closer to town and sometimes play some poker. I never saw anything odd about Will. I never could have predicted what happened to him.” He heaved a long sigh at this, looking out the window at the sharp mountains with an expression of nostalgia.
“Well, what happened to him?” I asked, encouraging him to go on.
“He started talking about seeing someone peering in through his window at night. He talked about hearing sounds from under his bed while he was laying there in the dark- sounds like diseased breathing and shuffling. He started keeping all the lights on in his cabin twenty-four hours a day.” Steve leaned close to me. A glimmer of fear rippled across his pale, wrinkled face. “He started to lose his mind. Started digging holes all over the place, looking for something. Even in the middle of snowstorms, I would occasionally see him outside, digging. It seemed like he never slept anymore. It was classic cabin fever if I ever saw it.
“It was only a few weeks later that I came over here, concerned. I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, which was fairly unusual. I found the door hanging wide open. Propped up in a chair in the exact spot where you now sit, Will lay with a blast hole showing clear through his skull, a shotgun laying at his feet.
“And next to him, I found a blood-stained diary opened to the middle page. The last entry was stained with blood spatter, but still visible. I remember leaning down and reading it. It was only a few sentences long.” I glanced over at the bookshelf with the same diary, saying nothing.
“It said something like, ‘I see now what’s going on. The Twisted Man is leading me to the truth. Today, I will finally find it.’”
“And that was his suicide note?” I asked, my heart hammering in my chest. He nodded.
“Yeah. I went into town and got some rangers to come check it out. Eventually, they got cops and CSI there. They took all the stuff as evidence, including the diary,” he said. “Good riddance, I say. Reading something like that is never beneficial. Sometimes delusions spread like a virus, you know what I mean?” I did, but I said nothing. I glanced back at the diary, its black leather cover gleaming like a crouching snake.
And I wondered- if the police took the diary as evidence, how did it get back here?
***
“You said he had a wife living here with him, too?” I asked.
“Yeah… she went missing around the same time,” he said. “Pretty bizarre. The cops thought maybe she just moved away, but…” He shook his head grimly. “As far as I know, she was never seen again. It was like she had evaporated into thin air.”
After Steve left, I walked stiffly over to the bookshelf, taking down the diary. I flipped open through the pages. In the middle, I found the last entry. Spatters of old, darkened blood were scattered over the page like raindrops. I found the suicide note and read the date.
“January 27th, 2015,” it read. Will Lenning had not lived long after he started seeing the Twisted Man. I wondered if my fate would be the same.
The Sun had started to set outside as I sat with the diary at the small circular kitchen table, eating some stewed venison and rice as I read through the entries. At the end, Will Lenning said the Twisted Man had been trying to guide him somewhere, that, in fact, the Twisted Man had been trying to protect him from some great evil, rather than being the source of it.
I scoffed, feeling a flash of anger at his stupidity. His naivety obviously led to his death. But then a flash of insight struck me like lightning.
What if I was committing the same kind of stupidity? Perhaps I should just grab my gun and valuables and leave. I could take off on the snowmobile and be in town within a couple hours.
But, in my heart, I knew I would not. Something about the mystery of all this beckoned me to stay. Like a siren leading sailors to destruction, my curiosity called out to me, and I knew I would not be leaving that night. I needed answers.
And, sadly, I would find them.
***
I had fallen asleep with an empty bottle of beer in my hand. I sat in front of the TV, which only got satellite reception. There were, of course, no cable or phone lines threading their way through the forest. All of my power came from stored solar energy. Since I rarely watched TV and really only used it to cook or heat up water for bathing, the energy produced was sufficient even in winter. Tonight, though, I needed its sound, its mindless flashing of light and colors and canned laughter. It seemed to drive away the creeping, suffocating presence like a candle.
I woke suddenly. The TV flashed with static. The repetitive hissing of the white noise spit from the speakers like thousands of snakes. I glanced up at the clock. 3:33 AM. I looked around the dark cabin, confused for a long moment. I didn’t understand what had woken me so abruptly. The satellite had never gone out before, either, even with the howling winds and freezing hail of the Alaskan winter.
The TV started flickering as if the static were rising upwards. Black lines traced their way horizontally across the screen. The hissing deepened into a gurgle, and for a second, I thought I heard faint words behind the white noise. I thought I heard breathing, slow and diseased, like the death gasp of a drowning man.
A black line rose across the TV and an image came into view. The cabin was suddenly plunged into silence, except for the shrieking, wintry wind outside. I leaned close to the screen, confused at what I was looking at. It looked like a live camera feed of a room. As I took in the details, I realized it was my cabin. I saw myself in the chair, leaning close to the screen. I raised my hand, and the miniature version of me on the screen did likewise. Ice water seemed to drip down my spine as waves of dread coursed through my body.
“What the fuck is this?” I whispered, looking back to where the camera should be. It was just a coarse wooden ceiling in that corner. I turned back to the screen and nearly screamed.
The TV showed a pale, naked man crouching directly behind my chair now. With jerky movements, he rose, his broken spine twisting and shivering. A hissing voice rang out from the speakers. It spoke as if it had dirt and writhing maggots in its throat.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death,” it gurgled. “Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
Long, broken fingers with blackened nails reached out to touch my shoulders. I jumped out of the chair, stumbling back as I spun around in terror. My back smashed into the TV, and it fell to the floor with a shattering of glass and an explosion of light.
In those few moments before the darkness descended on me like a blanket, I thought I glimpsed a pale, sunken face with rotted, blackened eyes peeking out from behind the chair.
***
I turned on every light in the cabin, but there was no sign of the Twisted Man now. I knew I had to get out of there, though. I thought about the warning that the voice had spoken. If the creature wanted to attack me, then why hadn’t it just killed me while I was sleeping? None of it made sense. Who was watching me? The Twisted Man? And if he was, why warn me? Perhaps it was psychological warfare, I thought to myself. Perhaps the Twisted Man simply liked to play with his food before he ate it.
Thoughts raced through my head at a thousand miles an hour as I threw on snow pants and a couple heavy sweaters and coats. I covered up my entire body as much as I could to try to prevent frostbite. I had made up my mind to flee. There was no snowstorm tonight, though the entire landscape was blanketed in it and I knew the wind chill would be like an ice blade whipping against my skin. It was extremely dangerous to travel in the middle of the night like this in temperatures that might reach negative thirty degrees. Steve had been right, after all- Alaska had the highest missing persons rate of any state, and many of them were never found, their bodies likely frozen solid in the deep snow dozens of miles from the nearest town.
I grabbed my shotgun, jumped on my snowmobile and started heading to Steve’s cabin. I hoped I could wait there until the sunrise and then figure out what to do next.
But fate would take the decision out of my hands.
***
I felt like there were eyes watching me as I drove along the narrow, winding deer trail. The boughs of the evergreens reached into the path like greedy hands, grabbing at my coat and legs. More than a couple times, I thought I saw a pale, naked figure standing in the snow, but it had always gone when I turned to look.
I gave a sigh of relief when Steve’s place appeared in the distance. I could see the lights twinkling through the small windows of his log cabin. I pulled up next to his door, looking down. I saw two pairs of footprints there, one much smaller than the other. I found it odd, but shrugged it off. The snowmobile cut out with a sucking gurgle.
I knocked on the door hard a few times. Steve appeared after a few moments, groggy and half-dressed. He blinked slowly as he looked me up and down. His wrinkled face fell into a frown.
“Steve, I need a favor,” I said quickly. “Something weird is happening in my cabin. Can I stay here until morning, until maybe I can go to town or something? I can’t stay at my place tonight. I just can’t.” He nodded, yawning and motioning me in.
“You can sleep on the couch, I guess,” Steve said. “Put that shotgun somewhere safe, though, boy.” He had a partitioned bedroom in his cabin. It was significantly larger than my little one-room cabin, though it was basically still just a joint kitchen-living room, a small bedroom and a bathroom. He pointed to a well-worn couch in the corner and gave me an apathetic wave as he stumbled back into his bedroom, slamming the door.
I couldn’t sleep, though. I tiptoed around the room, looking at Steve’s bookshelf. He had a rather strange taste in books- lots of Anne Rule and true crime there. I saw dozens of books about Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Chase, Herbert Mullin, Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez among the collection. At the end, a large, black binder stood, unlabeled and worn-looking. It reminded me of the look of that leather-bound diary for a second, and my heart dropped. But logically, I knew this was just a coincidence. Yet, still, I pulled out the binder, my curiosity piqued.
What I found inside filled me with dread and horror.
Countless news clippings covered the length of it. The first clipping was from nearly twenty years earlier, about a woman who went missing in the Alaskan forest while hiking. A later one confirmed that her body was never found, and that her family was still hoping that she might turn up alive somewhere. A reward was offered for any information, it said.
And every page after that was more of the same: missing woman, murdered prostitute, missing man, no leads. I kept flipping through until I found clippings about Will Lenning’s suicide and the sudden disappearance of his wife. On the article about the suicide, Steve had used red marker to scrawl, “HA HA!” next to it.
I heard the click of a gun being cocked from behind me. I froze as Steve’s voice traveled across the room like a whisper.
“How do you like my work, friend?” he asked, his tone jovial and mocking.
***
I still held the binder of horrors tightly in my hands as I stared open-mouthed at this man I thought I knew.
“It’s you? What, you killed Will Lenning and his wife? And a lot of other women, apparently.” Everything felt unreal, as if I were stuck in a dream. Steve’s grin spread across his face, but his blue eyes stayed cold and dead.
“Yes, well, she was cheating on him with me anyway. Just another whore, you know. They always get what’s coming to them in the end,” he hissed with hatred oozing from his voice. “It’s too bad, really. I just killed another slut tonight. I was planning on saving you for later. The urge isn’t too bad yet right now, after all. It comes in cycles, you see. It comes in waves…” I saw a glimmer of pale, naked flesh writhing behind Steve. With jerky movements, the Twisted Man came up behind him. I said nothing, just watching with wide-eyed horror and amazement.
“You need help, man,” I whispered. Steve laughed.
“Help? The only help they give people like me is a needle in the arm. You know that. That’s why it’s important to always cover your tracks…” The Twisted Man ran a long, broken finger across Steve’s neck. Steve gave a strangled cry and jumped. He spun around, screaming. I glanced over at my shotgun next to the couch.
I jumped for it as Steve turned back to me, firing his pistol twice. The first bullet soared high above me, raining wood splinters down on my head, but the second ripped into my leg. A cold, burning pain ran like fire up my shin. I screamed in agony and battle fury as I gripped the shotgun, spinning and firing.
Steve’s head exploded as the slug ripped through his brain. His forehead collapsed like a smashed melon as bone splinters and blood sprayed the wall behind him.
The Twisted Man stood there, hunched over, grinning up at me. I felt warm blood gushing from my leg as I stared back at him, breathing hard. I wondered if I was dying.
“You… you weren’t after me at all, were you?” I asked. “You were after… Steve.” But the Twisted Man said nothing. After a long moment, he slinked back into the shadows of the bedroom and disappeared.
***
As night crawled its way toward morning, I thought back to the words the Twisted Man had spoken through the TV, suddenly understanding everything.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death. Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
He hadn’t been trying to hurt me at all. He had been trying to warn me. He had probably tried to warn Will Lenning and his wife, too.
I wrapped my leg in gauze, gritting my teeth. The wound looked puckered and deep, but I could still move my foot, and the bullet had gone clean through the flesh. I poured alcohol on it, screaming in pain as it burned its way through my skin. After rummaging through Steve’s bathroom, I found some prescription painkillers and swallowed a handful of them with a beer. I knew I would need the opiate high to get through the pain of riding into town with a mutilated leg.
As the Sun finally rose, I made my way outside the blood-stained floors of the cabin to my snowmobile. Before I left, I glanced back at that horrid place, the scene of so much torment and death.
In the open doorway, the Twisted Man stood, his back hunched, his rotted lips grinning at me. His hand lifted up into the air with jerky movements and waved.
I waved back as I started the engine and headed into town.

A few years ago, I decided I needed a major life change. Everything seemed to be going downhill- my finances, my mental health, my life. I would go weeks without sleeping sometimes as the heavy traffic passed through the city streets down below. Every time I went outside, I saw more homeless people, more needles and crack pipes littering the ground, more muggings and assaults and overdoses and deaths. The city had become a wasteland, and I knew it was time to leave.
I had no girlfriend, no wife, no kids. My parents had both died a few years prior and I barely talked to my siblings anymore. I had nothing to tie me down to this place where I felt like I was dying inside a little more each day.
That was when I sold nearly everything I owned, got in my car and drove up to Alaska to try starting anew. I bought a small cabin and a plot of land in the middle of its majestic mountains and dark, enchanting forests. In the winter, the Northern Lights would shine through like the eyes of God, sending out divine trails of light that danced through the sky in cosmic waves.
And while the move did help give me some peace of mind, in the end, the source of all my problems had ultimately followed me thousands of miles into this endless wilderness. It would take me a long time to realize the cause of all this misery was myself.
Because, as a wise man once said, “Wherever I go, there I am.”
***
I lived in that cabin for three months without any major issues other than the constant threat of bears, moose and wolves. I had a rifle and a shotgun for hunting, a small garden in the backyard and a solar panel to generate electricity.
“This is the life,” I said, relaxing on a hammock I had strung across the corner of the cabin while staring at the endless beauty directly outside the window. White-capped mountains loomed like giants in front of thick clusters of evergreens. A virgin covering of fluffy snow made the entire world glisten and sparkle. There wasn’t a house or road in sight.
“No work, no stress, no pollution, no cars honking all the time…” I closed my eyes, breathing in the clean air. I ended up falling asleep for a couple hours, waking up just as the Sun had started setting. Bright orange streaks mixed with the bloody smears of the fading light as it disappeared behind the mountains.
I groggily arose, stumbling over to make a cup of instant coffee. As I sipped it, I wandered around the room, looking for something to pass the time. There were still quite a few random objects left behind by the last owner that I hadn’t gotten rid of yet. I had moved in to find a stocked bookshelf filled with classics by Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Bored, I started rifling through the collection, looking for something good to pass the time. As I shuffled past “The Maze of Death” and “Ubik”, something caught my eye.
A black, leather-bound book with no title or author name stood there, its cover faded with time and wear. Curious, I pulled it out and opened it. I saw the cursive scrawled across the pages in a neat, copperplate script and realized it was a diary left behind by the previous owner. The first entry was dated “January 9th, 2015.” This is what it said.
***
“I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not. I went into town to talk to my therapist yesterday and she said I should try writing everything down. She talks to me like it’s all in my head. But I know it’s not.
“When I first moved into the cabin, it seemed like Paradise. I never thought in a million years that something would be slinking around at night. I never thought it would be hiding under my bed, peeking in windows and following me like a shadow.
“Right now, I’m snowed in with a cup of coffee in one hand and my pistol in the other. I can’t sleep anymore. I keep hearing something shuffling around under the bed. Sometimes, I think I even hear ragged breathing, as if a corpse with dirt in its lungs had come back to life.
“I’ve caught glimpses of that thing in the darkness. Whatever it is, its skin is loose, almost falling off the bone. It almost looks like a naked, emaciated man. Its eyes are rotted and dark, its back hunched, its spine twisted and jutting out like tumors. It moves in this slow, jerky way, but I can never seem to catch it. Its body seems broken and out of alignment. Its legs bend the wrong way sometimes.
“By the time I turn on the lights or try to take a video of it, it’s always disappeared. But its fetid odor remains. It lingers in the cabin like a sweet-smelling, spreading infection.
“I don’t know what it wants from me. I want to leave, but with the storm raging outside, I’m stuck here, unable to get all the way back to town. The snow surrounds the cabin in mounds five feet high. I feel like a prisoner caged with a rabid beast, not knowing when it will strike.
“My wife claims she hasn’t seen or heard anything, but she keeps vanishing on me. Last night, she disappeared in the middle of a snowstorm. Where did she go? I asked her in the morning, but she said she was here the whole time. She didn’t remember anything. There’s no way she went into town. There wasn’t time and the trails were impassable that far down.
“Something’s going on here, but I don’t know what it is. I’m truly scared for our lives.”
I slammed the diary shut, not wanting to read anymore. I didn’t want to become infected by some kind of contagious cabin fever. If the last owner had gone insane in the mountains and started hallucinating naked corpses crawling around, I really didn’t want to know.
I shoved the diary back in the bookshelf, going for “The Maze of Death” instead. I tried to forget what I had read in the diary as I flew through the novella. All night, I tried to get the image of the naked, twisting man with rotted eyes out of my head, but I couldn’t.
I eventually fell asleep right before dawn. But, as my eyes were closing, I thought I saw a silhouette in the window- a starved man with excited, black eyes that seemed to be rotting out of his skull. I thought I saw him put his inhumanly long fingers against the glass as he leaned forward. I blinked, sitting up and glancing out into the white, snow-covered wonderland.
There was nothing there.
***
Another hunter occasionally followed the deer trails near my cabin. A frozen lake stood a quarter-mile away, the surface white and covered in thick drifts of snow. I bundled up, deciding to go outside for a hike in the frigid dawn. I strapped on my snowshoes and grabbed my shotgun, as I always did when I went outside. I never knew when a polar bear might be waiting around the next tree, after all.
I opened the door, seeing footprints pressed into the snow all around my house. At first, I thought it was that silhouette I had seen, the nightmarish thing from the diary. But the footprints didn’t go over to my window. They followed the trail twenty feet away, veering off towards the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill. I glanced down in that direction, seeing a black figure plodding slowly forward.
“Steve!” I cried, recognizing my only neighbor in a four-mile radius. He had a cabin about a mile away on his own little plot of land. He jumped, clearly startled by the sudden noise. His black snow pants and heavy fur coat swished together as he spun, raising his rifle high. When he saw me, he immediately lowered it and put a gloved hand up in a friendly greeting.
“Hey Josh! Surprised to see you up this early,” he yelled over the muted wintry landscape. Sounds always seemed different after it snowed, as if all the noise in the world had become faded and dead.
“Yeah, I’ve been having a little trouble sleeping,” I said, slinging my shotgun around my shoulder. “What are you doing anyway?”
“Just a little hunting, you know,” he said, giving me a sly wink. “Animals are always most active around dusk and dawn, it seems. That’s when I always have the best luck, anyway.” He stepped close to me, staring me in the eyes. “You do look like shit. Those bags under your eyes are big enough to carry groceries in.”
“Yeah, trust me, I know… Hey, this might sound a little weird, but did you know the previous owner of this cabin?” I asked. Steve’s wrinkled, old face fell into a scowl. His expression immediately became guarded and distant.
“Sure, sure, we met,” he exclaimed bluntly. He seemed to be searching my face for something, but I didn’t know what. His reaction left me feeling off-balance and nervous.
“Is he still around?” I said. Steve’s scowl deepened.
“Buddy, I don’t know what this is about, but he’s dead. He’s been dead. He died in that cabin, actually.” He pointed a finger at my home accusingly. With those words, my heart seemed to drop into my stomach. Waves of dread flowed through my body like water.
“How… how did he die? Like a heart attack or something?” I asked. Steve’s gaze turned downwards. He didn’t meet my eyes.
“Do you know that Alaska has the highest missing persons rate in the entire United States? It’s not even close. In fact, for the population size, we have far more people who go missing and never get found than anywhere else. They even have a name for it: the Alaska Triangle,” Steve said. “And we’re square in the middle of it.” I stared blankly at him, wondering where he was going with this. It seemed like a way to avoid answering my question.
“No, I didn’t know that…” I responded. Steve nodded, raising his head again. He heaved a deep sigh.
“Look, the thing with the last owner and his wife… it’s somewhat disturbing. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you, but it’s certainly not going to help your peace of mind. And it definitely isn’t going to help you get some sleep.”
“I want to know,” I insisted instantly. The wind started to whip past us. Flakes of ice and snow flew sideways in the sudden currents.
“Let’s go back to your cabin then,” Steve said, pulling his heavy fur-lined hood off and shaking out his long, black hair behind him. “I could use a bit of whiskey to warm up.”
***
We sat down with a bottle of Johnny Walker and two shot glasses. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but Steve certainly was. He chugged three shots in the span of a minute. I sipped at mine, drinking half and putting it back down on the coffee table with a thunk. Steve grunted, hissing through his open mouth for a moment.
“Ugh, that’s the good stuff,” he said, slamming his chest as the burning liquor worked its way down. Steve looked up at me with a new sparkle in his eyes. “Huh, so you want to know about what happened to Will Lenning. Well, I’ll tell you that no one really knows the whole story. I used to see him occasionally, come down and have a drink and talk. We all know each other around here, obviously.” I nodded, motioning him on. “He seemed like a normal, upstanding guy. He kinda reminded me of you, actually. A young guy trying to escape the hustle and bustle of the city life, the cancer of the American Dream.
“Well, he was here for maybe a couple months, I don’t know. Everything seemed fine. We used to go skeet shooting occasionally, have a beer, you know. We’d get together with a couple other hunters who live closer to town and sometimes play some poker. I never saw anything odd about Will. I never could have predicted what happened to him.” He heaved a long sigh at this, looking out the window at the sharp mountains with an expression of nostalgia.
“Well, what happened to him?” I asked, encouraging him to go on.
“He started talking about seeing someone peering in through his window at night. He talked about hearing sounds from under his bed while he was laying there in the dark- sounds like diseased breathing and shuffling. He started keeping all the lights on in his cabin twenty-four hours a day.” Steve leaned close to me. A glimmer of fear rippled across his pale, wrinkled face. “He started to lose his mind. Started digging holes all over the place, looking for something. Even in the middle of snowstorms, I would occasionally see him outside, digging. It seemed like he never slept anymore. It was classic cabin fever if I ever saw it.
“It was only a few weeks later that I came over here, concerned. I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, which was fairly unusual. I found the door hanging wide open. Propped up in a chair in the exact spot where you now sit, Will lay with a blast hole showing clear through his skull, a shotgun laying at his feet.
“And next to him, I found a blood-stained diary opened to the middle page. The last entry was stained with blood spatter, but still visible. I remember leaning down and reading it. It was only a few sentences long.” I glanced over at the bookshelf with the same diary, saying nothing.
“It said something like, ‘I see now what’s going on. The Twisted Man is leading me to the truth. Today, I will finally find it.’”
“And that was his suicide note?” I asked, my heart hammering in my chest. He nodded.
“Yeah. I went into town and got some rangers to come check it out. Eventually, they got cops and CSI there. They took all the stuff as evidence, including the diary,” he said. “Good riddance, I say. Reading something like that is never beneficial. Sometimes delusions spread like a virus, you know what I mean?” I did, but I said nothing. I glanced back at the diary, its black leather cover gleaming like a crouching snake.
And I wondered- if the police took the diary as evidence, how did it get back here?
***
“You said he had a wife living here with him, too?” I asked.
“Yeah… she went missing around the same time,” he said. “Pretty bizarre. The cops thought maybe she just moved away, but…” He shook his head grimly. “As far as I know, she was never seen again. It was like she had evaporated into thin air.”
After Steve left, I walked stiffly over to the bookshelf, taking down the diary. I flipped open through the pages. In the middle, I found the last entry. Spatters of old, darkened blood were scattered over the page like raindrops. I found the suicide note and read the date.
“January 27th, 2015,” it read. Will Lenning had not lived long after he started seeing the Twisted Man. I wondered if my fate would be the same.
The Sun had started to set outside as I sat with the diary at the small circular kitchen table, eating some stewed venison and rice as I read through the entries. At the end, Will Lenning said the Twisted Man had been trying to guide him somewhere, that, in fact, the Twisted Man had been trying to protect him from some great evil, rather than being the source of it.
I scoffed, feeling a flash of anger at his stupidity. His naivety obviously led to his death. But then a flash of insight struck me like lightning.
What if I was committing the same kind of stupidity? Perhaps I should just grab my gun and valuables and leave. I could take off on the snowmobile and be in town within a couple hours.
But, in my heart, I knew I would not. Something about the mystery of all this beckoned me to stay. Like a siren leading sailors to destruction, my curiosity called out to me, and I knew I would not be leaving that night. I needed answers.
And, sadly, I would find them.
***
I had fallen asleep with an empty bottle of beer in my hand. I sat in front of the TV, which only got satellite reception. There were, of course, no cable or phone lines threading their way through the forest. All of my power came from stored solar energy. Since I rarely watched TV and really only used it to cook or heat up water for bathing, the energy produced was sufficient even in winter. Tonight, though, I needed its sound, its mindless flashing of light and colors and canned laughter. It seemed to drive away the creeping, suffocating presence like a candle.
I woke suddenly. The TV flashed with static. The repetitive hissing of the white noise spit from the speakers like thousands of snakes. I glanced up at the clock. 3:33 AM. I looked around the dark cabin, confused for a long moment. I didn’t understand what had woken me so abruptly. The satellite had never gone out before, either, even with the howling winds and freezing hail of the Alaskan winter.
The TV started flickering as if the static were rising upwards. Black lines traced their way horizontally across the screen. The hissing deepened into a gurgle, and for a second, I thought I heard faint words behind the white noise. I thought I heard breathing, slow and diseased, like the death gasp of a drowning man.
A black line rose across the TV and an image came into view. The cabin was suddenly plunged into silence, except for the shrieking, wintry wind outside. I leaned close to the screen, confused at what I was looking at. It looked like a live camera feed of a room. As I took in the details, I realized it was my cabin. I saw myself in the chair, leaning close to the screen. I raised my hand, and the miniature version of me on the screen did likewise. Ice water seemed to drip down my spine as waves of dread coursed through my body.
“What the fuck is this?” I whispered, looking back to where the camera should be. It was just a coarse wooden ceiling in that corner. I turned back to the screen and nearly screamed.
The TV showed a pale, naked man crouching directly behind my chair now. With jerky movements, he rose, his broken spine twisting and shivering. A hissing voice rang out from the speakers. It spoke as if it had dirt and writhing maggots in its throat.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death,” it gurgled. “Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
Long, broken fingers with blackened nails reached out to touch my shoulders. I jumped out of the chair, stumbling back as I spun around in terror. My back smashed into the TV, and it fell to the floor with a shattering of glass and an explosion of light.
In those few moments before the darkness descended on me like a blanket, I thought I glimpsed a pale, sunken face with rotted, blackened eyes peeking out from behind the chair.
***
I turned on every light in the cabin, but there was no sign of the Twisted Man now. I knew I had to get out of there, though. I thought about the warning that the voice had spoken. If the creature wanted to attack me, then why hadn’t it just killed me while I was sleeping? None of it made sense. Who was watching me? The Twisted Man? And if he was, why warn me? Perhaps it was psychological warfare, I thought to myself. Perhaps the Twisted Man simply liked to play with his food before he ate it.
Thoughts raced through my head at a thousand miles an hour as I threw on snow pants and a couple heavy sweaters and coats. I covered up my entire body as much as I could to try to prevent frostbite. I had made up my mind to flee. There was no snowstorm tonight, though the entire landscape was blanketed in it and I knew the wind chill would be like an ice blade whipping against my skin. It was extremely dangerous to travel in the middle of the night like this in temperatures that might reach negative thirty degrees. Steve had been right, after all- Alaska had the highest missing persons rate of any state, and many of them were never found, their bodies likely frozen solid in the deep snow dozens of miles from the nearest town.
I grabbed my shotgun, jumped on my snowmobile and started heading to Steve’s cabin. I hoped I could wait there until the sunrise and then figure out what to do next.
But fate would take the decision out of my hands.
***
I felt like there were eyes watching me as I drove along the narrow, winding deer trail. The boughs of the evergreens reached into the path like greedy hands, grabbing at my coat and legs. More than a couple times, I thought I saw a pale, naked figure standing in the snow, but it had always gone when I turned to look.
I gave a sigh of relief when Steve’s place appeared in the distance. I could see the lights twinkling through the small windows of his log cabin. I pulled up next to his door, looking down. I saw two pairs of footprints there, one much smaller than the other. I found it odd, but shrugged it off. The snowmobile cut out with a sucking gurgle.
I knocked on the door hard a few times. Steve appeared after a few moments, groggy and half-dressed. He blinked slowly as he looked me up and down. His wrinkled face fell into a frown.
“Steve, I need a favor,” I said quickly. “Something weird is happening in my cabin. Can I stay here until morning, until maybe I can go to town or something? I can’t stay at my place tonight. I just can’t.” He nodded, yawning and motioning me in.
“You can sleep on the couch, I guess,” Steve said. “Put that shotgun somewhere safe, though, boy.” He had a partitioned bedroom in his cabin. It was significantly larger than my little one-room cabin, though it was basically still just a joint kitchen-living room, a small bedroom and a bathroom. He pointed to a well-worn couch in the corner and gave me an apathetic wave as he stumbled back into his bedroom, slamming the door.
I couldn’t sleep, though. I tiptoed around the room, looking at Steve’s bookshelf. He had a rather strange taste in books- lots of Anne Rule and true crime there. I saw dozens of books about Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Chase, Herbert Mullin, Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez among the collection. At the end, a large, black binder stood, unlabeled and worn-looking. It reminded me of the look of that leather-bound diary for a second, and my heart dropped. But logically, I knew this was just a coincidence. Yet, still, I pulled out the binder, my curiosity piqued.
What I found inside filled me with dread and horror.
Countless news clippings covered the length of it. The first clipping was from nearly twenty years earlier, about a woman who went missing in the Alaskan forest while hiking. A later one confirmed that her body was never found, and that her family was still hoping that she might turn up alive somewhere. A reward was offered for any information, it said.
And every page after that was more of the same: missing woman, murdered prostitute, missing man, no leads. I kept flipping through until I found clippings about Will Lenning’s suicide and the sudden disappearance of his wife. On the article about the suicide, Steve had used red marker to scrawl, “HA HA!” next to it.
I heard the click of a gun being cocked from behind me. I froze as Steve’s voice traveled across the room like a whisper.
“How do you like my work, friend?” he asked, his tone jovial and mocking.
***
I still held the binder of horrors tightly in my hands as I stared open-mouthed at this man I thought I knew.
“It’s you? What, you killed Will Lenning and his wife? And a lot of other women, apparently.” Everything felt unreal, as if I were stuck in a dream. Steve’s grin spread across his face, but his blue eyes stayed cold and dead.
“Yes, well, she was cheating on him with me anyway. Just another whore, you know. They always get what’s coming to them in the end,” he hissed with hatred oozing from his voice. “It’s too bad, really. I just killed another slut tonight. I was planning on saving you for later. The urge isn’t too bad yet right now, after all. It comes in cycles, you see. It comes in waves…” I saw a glimmer of pale, naked flesh writhing behind Steve. With jerky movements, the Twisted Man came up behind him. I said nothing, just watching with wide-eyed horror and amazement.
“You need help, man,” I whispered. Steve laughed.
“Help? The only help they give people like me is a needle in the arm. You know that. That’s why it’s important to always cover your tracks…” The Twisted Man ran a long, broken finger across Steve’s neck. Steve gave a strangled cry and jumped. He spun around, screaming. I glanced over at my shotgun next to the couch.
I jumped for it as Steve turned back to me, firing his pistol twice. The first bullet soared high above me, raining wood splinters down on my head, but the second ripped into my leg. A cold, burning pain ran like fire up my shin. I screamed in agony and battle fury as I gripped the shotgun, spinning and firing.
Steve’s head exploded as the slug ripped through his brain. His forehead collapsed like a smashed melon as bone splinters and blood sprayed the wall behind him.
The Twisted Man stood there, hunched over, grinning up at me. I felt warm blood gushing from my leg as I stared back at him, breathing hard. I wondered if I was dying.
“You… you weren’t after me at all, were you?” I asked. “You were after… Steve.” But the Twisted Man said nothing. After a long moment, he slinked back into the shadows of the bedroom and disappeared.
***
As night crawled its way toward morning, I thought back to the words the Twisted Man had spoken through the TV, suddenly understanding everything.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death. Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
He hadn’t been trying to hurt me at all. He had been trying to warn me. He had probably tried to warn Will Lenning and his wife, too.
I wrapped my leg in gauze, gritting my teeth. The wound looked puckered and deep, but I could still move my foot, and the bullet had gone clean through the flesh. I poured alcohol on it, screaming in pain as it burned its way through my skin. After rummaging through Steve’s bathroom, I found some prescription painkillers and swallowed a handful of them with a beer. I knew I would need the opiate high to get through the pain of riding into town with a mutilated leg.
As the Sun finally rose, I made my way outside the blood-stained floors of the cabin to my snowmobile. Before I left, I glanced back at that horrid place, the scene of so much torment and death.
In the open doorway, the Twisted Man stood, his back hunched, his rotted lips grinning at me. His hand lifted up into the air with jerky movements and waved.
I waved back as I started the engine and headed into town.

A few years ago, I decided I needed a major life change. Everything seemed to be going downhill- my finances, my mental health, my life. I would go weeks without sleeping sometimes as the heavy traffic passed through the city streets down below. Every time I went outside, I saw more homeless people, more needles and crack pipes littering the ground, more muggings and assaults and overdoses and deaths. The city had become a wasteland, and I knew it was time to leave.
I had no girlfriend, no wife, no kids. My parents had both died a few years prior and I barely talked to my siblings anymore. I had nothing to tie me down to this place where I felt like I was dying inside a little more each day.
That was when I sold nearly everything I owned, got in my car and drove up to Alaska to try starting anew. I bought a small cabin and a plot of land in the middle of its majestic mountains and dark, enchanting forests. In the winter, the Northern Lights would shine through like the eyes of God, sending out divine trails of light that danced through the sky in cosmic waves.
And while the move did help give me some peace of mind, in the end, the source of all my problems had ultimately followed me thousands of miles into this endless wilderness. It would take me a long time to realize the cause of all this misery was myself.
Because, as a wise man once said, “Wherever I go, there I am.”
***
I lived in that cabin for three months without any major issues other than the constant threat of bears, moose and wolves. I had a rifle and a shotgun for hunting, a small garden in the backyard and a solar panel to generate electricity.
“This is the life,” I said, relaxing on a hammock I had strung across the corner of the cabin while staring at the endless beauty directly outside the window. White-capped mountains loomed like giants in front of thick clusters of evergreens. A virgin covering of fluffy snow made the entire world glisten and sparkle. There wasn’t a house or road in sight.
“No work, no stress, no pollution, no cars honking all the time…” I closed my eyes, breathing in the clean air. I ended up falling asleep for a couple hours, waking up just as the Sun had started setting. Bright orange streaks mixed with the bloody smears of the fading light as it disappeared behind the mountains.
I groggily arose, stumbling over to make a cup of instant coffee. As I sipped it, I wandered around the room, looking for something to pass the time. There were still quite a few random objects left behind by the last owner that I hadn’t gotten rid of yet. I had moved in to find a stocked bookshelf filled with classics by Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Bored, I started rifling through the collection, looking for something good to pass the time. As I shuffled past “The Maze of Death” and “Ubik”, something caught my eye.
A black, leather-bound book with no title or author name stood there, its cover faded with time and wear. Curious, I pulled it out and opened it. I saw the cursive scrawled across the pages in a neat, copperplate script and realized it was a diary left behind by the previous owner. The first entry was dated “January 9th, 2015.” This is what it said.
***
“I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not. I went into town to talk to my therapist yesterday and she said I should try writing everything down. She talks to me like it’s all in my head. But I know it’s not.
“When I first moved into the cabin, it seemed like Paradise. I never thought in a million years that something would be slinking around at night. I never thought it would be hiding under my bed, peeking in windows and following me like a shadow.
“Right now, I’m snowed in with a cup of coffee in one hand and my pistol in the other. I can’t sleep anymore. I keep hearing something shuffling around under the bed. Sometimes, I think I even hear ragged breathing, as if a corpse with dirt in its lungs had come back to life.
“I’ve caught glimpses of that thing in the darkness. Whatever it is, its skin is loose, almost falling off the bone. It almost looks like a naked, emaciated man. Its eyes are rotted and dark, its back hunched, its spine twisted and jutting out like tumors. It moves in this slow, jerky way, but I can never seem to catch it. Its body seems broken and out of alignment. Its legs bend the wrong way sometimes.
“By the time I turn on the lights or try to take a video of it, it’s always disappeared. But its fetid odor remains. It lingers in the cabin like a sweet-smelling, spreading infection.
“I don’t know what it wants from me. I want to leave, but with the storm raging outside, I’m stuck here, unable to get all the way back to town. The snow surrounds the cabin in mounds five feet high. I feel like a prisoner caged with a rabid beast, not knowing when it will strike.
“My wife claims she hasn’t seen or heard anything, but she keeps vanishing on me. Last night, she disappeared in the middle of a snowstorm. Where did she go? I asked her in the morning, but she said she was here the whole time. She didn’t remember anything. There’s no way she went into town. There wasn’t time and the trails were impassable that far down.
“Something’s going on here, but I don’t know what it is. I’m truly scared for our lives.”
I slammed the diary shut, not wanting to read anymore. I didn’t want to become infected by some kind of contagious cabin fever. If the last owner had gone insane in the mountains and started hallucinating naked corpses crawling around, I really didn’t want to know.
I shoved the diary back in the bookshelf, going for “The Maze of Death” instead. I tried to forget what I had read in the diary as I flew through the novella. All night, I tried to get the image of the naked, twisting man with rotted eyes out of my head, but I couldn’t.
I eventually fell asleep right before dawn. But, as my eyes were closing, I thought I saw a silhouette in the window- a starved man with excited, black eyes that seemed to be rotting out of his skull. I thought I saw him put his inhumanly long fingers against the glass as he leaned forward. I blinked, sitting up and glancing out into the white, snow-covered wonderland.
There was nothing there.
***
Another hunter occasionally followed the deer trails near my cabin. A frozen lake stood a quarter-mile away, the surface white and covered in thick drifts of snow. I bundled up, deciding to go outside for a hike in the frigid dawn. I strapped on my snowshoes and grabbed my shotgun, as I always did when I went outside. I never knew when a polar bear might be waiting around the next tree, after all.
I opened the door, seeing footprints pressed into the snow all around my house. At first, I thought it was that silhouette I had seen, the nightmarish thing from the diary. But the footprints didn’t go over to my window. They followed the trail twenty feet away, veering off towards the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill. I glanced down in that direction, seeing a black figure plodding slowly forward.
“Steve!” I cried, recognizing my only neighbor in a four-mile radius. He had a cabin about a mile away on his own little plot of land. He jumped, clearly startled by the sudden noise. His black snow pants and heavy fur coat swished together as he spun, raising his rifle high. When he saw me, he immediately lowered it and put a gloved hand up in a friendly greeting.
“Hey Josh! Surprised to see you up this early,” he yelled over the muted wintry landscape. Sounds always seemed different after it snowed, as if all the noise in the world had become faded and dead.
“Yeah, I’ve been having a little trouble sleeping,” I said, slinging my shotgun around my shoulder. “What are you doing anyway?”
“Just a little hunting, you know,” he said, giving me a sly wink. “Animals are always most active around dusk and dawn, it seems. That’s when I always have the best luck, anyway.” He stepped close to me, staring me in the eyes. “You do look like shit. Those bags under your eyes are big enough to carry groceries in.”
“Yeah, trust me, I know… Hey, this might sound a little weird, but did you know the previous owner of this cabin?” I asked. Steve’s wrinkled, old face fell into a scowl. His expression immediately became guarded and distant.
“Sure, sure, we met,” he exclaimed bluntly. He seemed to be searching my face for something, but I didn’t know what. His reaction left me feeling off-balance and nervous.
“Is he still around?” I said. Steve’s scowl deepened.
“Buddy, I don’t know what this is about, but he’s dead. He’s been dead. He died in that cabin, actually.” He pointed a finger at my home accusingly. With those words, my heart seemed to drop into my stomach. Waves of dread flowed through my body like water.
“How… how did he die? Like a heart attack or something?” I asked. Steve’s gaze turned downwards. He didn’t meet my eyes.
“Do you know that Alaska has the highest missing persons rate in the entire United States? It’s not even close. In fact, for the population size, we have far more people who go missing and never get found than anywhere else. They even have a name for it: the Alaska Triangle,” Steve said. “And we’re square in the middle of it.” I stared blankly at him, wondering where he was going with this. It seemed like a way to avoid answering my question.
“No, I didn’t know that…” I responded. Steve nodded, raising his head again. He heaved a deep sigh.
“Look, the thing with the last owner and his wife… it’s somewhat disturbing. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you, but it’s certainly not going to help your peace of mind. And it definitely isn’t going to help you get some sleep.”
“I want to know,” I insisted instantly. The wind started to whip past us. Flakes of ice and snow flew sideways in the sudden currents.
“Let’s go back to your cabin then,” Steve said, pulling his heavy fur-lined hood off and shaking out his long, black hair behind him. “I could use a bit of whiskey to warm up.”
***
We sat down with a bottle of Johnny Walker and two shot glasses. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but Steve certainly was. He chugged three shots in the span of a minute. I sipped at mine, drinking half and putting it back down on the coffee table with a thunk. Steve grunted, hissing through his open mouth for a moment.
“Ugh, that’s the good stuff,” he said, slamming his chest as the burning liquor worked its way down. Steve looked up at me with a new sparkle in his eyes. “Huh, so you want to know about what happened to Will Lenning. Well, I’ll tell you that no one really knows the whole story. I used to see him occasionally, come down and have a drink and talk. We all know each other around here, obviously.” I nodded, motioning him on. “He seemed like a normal, upstanding guy. He kinda reminded me of you, actually. A young guy trying to escape the hustle and bustle of the city life, the cancer of the American Dream.
“Well, he was here for maybe a couple months, I don’t know. Everything seemed fine. We used to go skeet shooting occasionally, have a beer, you know. We’d get together with a couple other hunters who live closer to town and sometimes play some poker. I never saw anything odd about Will. I never could have predicted what happened to him.” He heaved a long sigh at this, looking out the window at the sharp mountains with an expression of nostalgia.
“Well, what happened to him?” I asked, encouraging him to go on.
“He started talking about seeing someone peering in through his window at night. He talked about hearing sounds from under his bed while he was laying there in the dark- sounds like diseased breathing and shuffling. He started keeping all the lights on in his cabin twenty-four hours a day.” Steve leaned close to me. A glimmer of fear rippled across his pale, wrinkled face. “He started to lose his mind. Started digging holes all over the place, looking for something. Even in the middle of snowstorms, I would occasionally see him outside, digging. It seemed like he never slept anymore. It was classic cabin fever if I ever saw it.
“It was only a few weeks later that I came over here, concerned. I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, which was fairly unusual. I found the door hanging wide open. Propped up in a chair in the exact spot where you now sit, Will lay with a blast hole showing clear through his skull, a shotgun laying at his feet.
“And next to him, I found a blood-stained diary opened to the middle page. The last entry was stained with blood spatter, but still visible. I remember leaning down and reading it. It was only a few sentences long.” I glanced over at the bookshelf with the same diary, saying nothing.
“It said something like, ‘I see now what’s going on. The Twisted Man is leading me to the truth. Today, I will finally find it.’”
“And that was his suicide note?” I asked, my heart hammering in my chest. He nodded.
“Yeah. I went into town and got some rangers to come check it out. Eventually, they got cops and CSI there. They took all the stuff as evidence, including the diary,” he said. “Good riddance, I say. Reading something like that is never beneficial. Sometimes delusions spread like a virus, you know what I mean?” I did, but I said nothing. I glanced back at the diary, its black leather cover gleaming like a crouching snake.
And I wondered- if the police took the diary as evidence, how did it get back here?
***
“You said he had a wife living here with him, too?” I asked.
“Yeah… she went missing around the same time,” he said. “Pretty bizarre. The cops thought maybe she just moved away, but…” He shook his head grimly. “As far as I know, she was never seen again. It was like she had evaporated into thin air.”
After Steve left, I walked stiffly over to the bookshelf, taking down the diary. I flipped open through the pages. In the middle, I found the last entry. Spatters of old, darkened blood were scattered over the page like raindrops. I found the suicide note and read the date.
“January 27th, 2015,” it read. Will Lenning had not lived long after he started seeing the Twisted Man. I wondered if my fate would be the same.
The Sun had started to set outside as I sat with the diary at the small circular kitchen table, eating some stewed venison and rice as I read through the entries. At the end, Will Lenning said the Twisted Man had been trying to guide him somewhere, that, in fact, the Twisted Man had been trying to protect him from some great evil, rather than being the source of it.
I scoffed, feeling a flash of anger at his stupidity. His naivety obviously led to his death. But then a flash of insight struck me like lightning.
What if I was committing the same kind of stupidity? Perhaps I should just grab my gun and valuables and leave. I could take off on the snowmobile and be in town within a couple hours.
But, in my heart, I knew I would not. Something about the mystery of all this beckoned me to stay. Like a siren leading sailors to destruction, my curiosity called out to me, and I knew I would not be leaving that night. I needed answers.
And, sadly, I would find them.
***
I had fallen asleep with an empty bottle of beer in my hand. I sat in front of the TV, which only got satellite reception. There were, of course, no cable or phone lines threading their way through the forest. All of my power came from stored solar energy. Since I rarely watched TV and really only used it to cook or heat up water for bathing, the energy produced was sufficient even in winter. Tonight, though, I needed its sound, its mindless flashing of light and colors and canned laughter. It seemed to drive away the creeping, suffocating presence like a candle.
I woke suddenly. The TV flashed with static. The repetitive hissing of the white noise spit from the speakers like thousands of snakes. I glanced up at the clock. 3:33 AM. I looked around the dark cabin, confused for a long moment. I didn’t understand what had woken me so abruptly. The satellite had never gone out before, either, even with the howling winds and freezing hail of the Alaskan winter.
The TV started flickering as if the static were rising upwards. Black lines traced their way horizontally across the screen. The hissing deepened into a gurgle, and for a second, I thought I heard faint words behind the white noise. I thought I heard breathing, slow and diseased, like the death gasp of a drowning man.
A black line rose across the TV and an image came into view. The cabin was suddenly plunged into silence, except for the shrieking, wintry wind outside. I leaned close to the screen, confused at what I was looking at. It looked like a live camera feed of a room. As I took in the details, I realized it was my cabin. I saw myself in the chair, leaning close to the screen. I raised my hand, and the miniature version of me on the screen did likewise. Ice water seemed to drip down my spine as waves of dread coursed through my body.
“What the fuck is this?” I whispered, looking back to where the camera should be. It was just a coarse wooden ceiling in that corner. I turned back to the screen and nearly screamed.
The TV showed a pale, naked man crouching directly behind my chair now. With jerky movements, he rose, his broken spine twisting and shivering. A hissing voice rang out from the speakers. It spoke as if it had dirt and writhing maggots in its throat.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death,” it gurgled. “Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
Long, broken fingers with blackened nails reached out to touch my shoulders. I jumped out of the chair, stumbling back as I spun around in terror. My back smashed into the TV, and it fell to the floor with a shattering of glass and an explosion of light.
In those few moments before the darkness descended on me like a blanket, I thought I glimpsed a pale, sunken face with rotted, blackened eyes peeking out from behind the chair.
***
I turned on every light in the cabin, but there was no sign of the Twisted Man now. I knew I had to get out of there, though. I thought about the warning that the voice had spoken. If the creature wanted to attack me, then why hadn’t it just killed me while I was sleeping? None of it made sense. Who was watching me? The Twisted Man? And if he was, why warn me? Perhaps it was psychological warfare, I thought to myself. Perhaps the Twisted Man simply liked to play with his food before he ate it.
Thoughts raced through my head at a thousand miles an hour as I threw on snow pants and a couple heavy sweaters and coats. I covered up my entire body as much as I could to try to prevent frostbite. I had made up my mind to flee. There was no snowstorm tonight, though the entire landscape was blanketed in it and I knew the wind chill would be like an ice blade whipping against my skin. It was extremely dangerous to travel in the middle of the night like this in temperatures that might reach negative thirty degrees. Steve had been right, after all- Alaska had the highest missing persons rate of any state, and many of them were never found, their bodies likely frozen solid in the deep snow dozens of miles from the nearest town.
I grabbed my shotgun, jumped on my snowmobile and started heading to Steve’s cabin. I hoped I could wait there until the sunrise and then figure out what to do next.
But fate would take the decision out of my hands.
***
I felt like there were eyes watching me as I drove along the narrow, winding deer trail. The boughs of the evergreens reached into the path like greedy hands, grabbing at my coat and legs. More than a couple times, I thought I saw a pale, naked figure standing in the snow, but it had always gone when I turned to look.
I gave a sigh of relief when Steve’s place appeared in the distance. I could see the lights twinkling through the small windows of his log cabin. I pulled up next to his door, looking down. I saw two pairs of footprints there, one much smaller than the other. I found it odd, but shrugged it off. The snowmobile cut out with a sucking gurgle.
I knocked on the door hard a few times. Steve appeared after a few moments, groggy and half-dressed. He blinked slowly as he looked me up and down. His wrinkled face fell into a frown.
“Steve, I need a favor,” I said quickly. “Something weird is happening in my cabin. Can I stay here until morning, until maybe I can go to town or something? I can’t stay at my place tonight. I just can’t.” He nodded, yawning and motioning me in.
“You can sleep on the couch, I guess,” Steve said. “Put that shotgun somewhere safe, though, boy.” He had a partitioned bedroom in his cabin. It was significantly larger than my little one-room cabin, though it was basically still just a joint kitchen-living room, a small bedroom and a bathroom. He pointed to a well-worn couch in the corner and gave me an apathetic wave as he stumbled back into his bedroom, slamming the door.
I couldn’t sleep, though. I tiptoed around the room, looking at Steve’s bookshelf. He had a rather strange taste in books- lots of Anne Rule and true crime there. I saw dozens of books about Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Chase, Herbert Mullin, Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez among the collection. At the end, a large, black binder stood, unlabeled and worn-looking. It reminded me of the look of that leather-bound diary for a second, and my heart dropped. But logically, I knew this was just a coincidence. Yet, still, I pulled out the binder, my curiosity piqued.
What I found inside filled me with dread and horror.
Countless news clippings covered the length of it. The first clipping was from nearly twenty years earlier, about a woman who went missing in the Alaskan forest while hiking. A later one confirmed that her body was never found, and that her family was still hoping that she might turn up alive somewhere. A reward was offered for any information, it said.
And every page after that was more of the same: missing woman, murdered prostitute, missing man, no leads. I kept flipping through until I found clippings about Will Lenning’s suicide and the sudden disappearance of his wife. On the article about the suicide, Steve had used red marker to scrawl, “HA HA!” next to it.
I heard the click of a gun being cocked from behind me. I froze as Steve’s voice traveled across the room like a whisper.
“How do you like my work, friend?” he asked, his tone jovial and mocking.
***
I still held the binder of horrors tightly in my hands as I stared open-mouthed at this man I thought I knew.
“It’s you? What, you killed Will Lenning and his wife? And a lot of other women, apparently.” Everything felt unreal, as if I were stuck in a dream. Steve’s grin spread across his face, but his blue eyes stayed cold and dead.
“Yes, well, she was cheating on him with me anyway. Just another whore, you know. They always get what’s coming to them in the end,” he hissed with hatred oozing from his voice. “It’s too bad, really. I just killed another slut tonight. I was planning on saving you for later. The urge isn’t too bad yet right now, after all. It comes in cycles, you see. It comes in waves…” I saw a glimmer of pale, naked flesh writhing behind Steve. With jerky movements, the Twisted Man came up behind him. I said nothing, just watching with wide-eyed horror and amazement.
“You need help, man,” I whispered. Steve laughed.
“Help? The only help they give people like me is a needle in the arm. You know that. That’s why it’s important to always cover your tracks…” The Twisted Man ran a long, broken finger across Steve’s neck. Steve gave a strangled cry and jumped. He spun around, screaming. I glanced over at my shotgun next to the couch.
I jumped for it as Steve turned back to me, firing his pistol twice. The first bullet soared high above me, raining wood splinters down on my head, but the second ripped into my leg. A cold, burning pain ran like fire up my shin. I screamed in agony and battle fury as I gripped the shotgun, spinning and firing.
Steve’s head exploded as the slug ripped through his brain. His forehead collapsed like a smashed melon as bone splinters and blood sprayed the wall behind him.
The Twisted Man stood there, hunched over, grinning up at me. I felt warm blood gushing from my leg as I stared back at him, breathing hard. I wondered if I was dying.
“You… you weren’t after me at all, were you?” I asked. “You were after… Steve.” But the Twisted Man said nothing. After a long moment, he slinked back into the shadows of the bedroom and disappeared.
***
As night crawled its way toward morning, I thought back to the words the Twisted Man had spoken through the TV, suddenly understanding everything.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death. Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
He hadn’t been trying to hurt me at all. He had been trying to warn me. He had probably tried to warn Will Lenning and his wife, too.
I wrapped my leg in gauze, gritting my teeth. The wound looked puckered and deep, but I could still move my foot, and the bullet had gone clean through the flesh. I poured alcohol on it, screaming in pain as it burned its way through my skin. After rummaging through Steve’s bathroom, I found some prescription painkillers and swallowed a handful of them with a beer. I knew I would need the opiate high to get through the pain of riding into town with a mutilated leg.
As the Sun finally rose, I made my way outside the blood-stained floors of the cabin to my snowmobile. Before I left, I glanced back at that horrid place, the scene of so much torment and death.
In the open doorway, the Twisted Man stood, his back hunched, his rotted lips grinning at me. His hand lifted up into the air with jerky movements and waved.
I waved back as I started the engine and headed into town.

A few years ago, I decided I needed a major life change. Everything seemed to be going downhill- my finances, my mental health, my life. I would go weeks without sleeping sometimes as the heavy traffic passed through the city streets down below. Every time I went outside, I saw more homeless people, more needles and crack pipes littering the ground, more muggings and assaults and overdoses and deaths. The city had become a wasteland, and I knew it was time to leave.
I had no girlfriend, no wife, no kids. My parents had both died a few years prior and I barely talked to my siblings anymore. I had nothing to tie me down to this place where I felt like I was dying inside a little more each day.
That was when I sold nearly everything I owned, got in my car and drove up to Alaska to try starting anew. I bought a small cabin and a plot of land in the middle of its majestic mountains and dark, enchanting forests. In the winter, the Northern Lights would shine through like the eyes of God, sending out divine trails of light that danced through the sky in cosmic waves.
And while the move did help give me some peace of mind, in the end, the source of all my problems had ultimately followed me thousands of miles into this endless wilderness. It would take me a long time to realize the cause of all this misery was myself.
Because, as a wise man once said, “Wherever I go, there I am.”
***
I lived in that cabin for three months without any major issues other than the constant threat of bears, moose and wolves. I had a rifle and a shotgun for hunting, a small garden in the backyard and a solar panel to generate electricity.
“This is the life,” I said, relaxing on a hammock I had strung across the corner of the cabin while staring at the endless beauty directly outside the window. White-capped mountains loomed like giants in front of thick clusters of evergreens. A virgin covering of fluffy snow made the entire world glisten and sparkle. There wasn’t a house or road in sight.
“No work, no stress, no pollution, no cars honking all the time…” I closed my eyes, breathing in the clean air. I ended up falling asleep for a couple hours, waking up just as the Sun had started setting. Bright orange streaks mixed with the bloody smears of the fading light as it disappeared behind the mountains.
I groggily arose, stumbling over to make a cup of instant coffee. As I sipped it, I wandered around the room, looking for something to pass the time. There were still quite a few random objects left behind by the last owner that I hadn’t gotten rid of yet. I had moved in to find a stocked bookshelf filled with classics by Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Bored, I started rifling through the collection, looking for something good to pass the time. As I shuffled past “The Maze of Death” and “Ubik”, something caught my eye.
A black, leather-bound book with no title or author name stood there, its cover faded with time and wear. Curious, I pulled it out and opened it. I saw the cursive scrawled across the pages in a neat, copperplate script and realized it was a diary left behind by the previous owner. The first entry was dated “January 9th, 2015.” This is what it said.
***
“I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not. I went into town to talk to my therapist yesterday and she said I should try writing everything down. She talks to me like it’s all in my head. But I know it’s not.
“When I first moved into the cabin, it seemed like Paradise. I never thought in a million years that something would be slinking around at night. I never thought it would be hiding under my bed, peeking in windows and following me like a shadow.
“Right now, I’m snowed in with a cup of coffee in one hand and my pistol in the other. I can’t sleep anymore. I keep hearing something shuffling around under the bed. Sometimes, I think I even hear ragged breathing, as if a corpse with dirt in its lungs had come back to life.
“I’ve caught glimpses of that thing in the darkness. Whatever it is, its skin is loose, almost falling off the bone. It almost looks like a naked, emaciated man. Its eyes are rotted and dark, its back hunched, its spine twisted and jutting out like tumors. It moves in this slow, jerky way, but I can never seem to catch it. Its body seems broken and out of alignment. Its legs bend the wrong way sometimes.
“By the time I turn on the lights or try to take a video of it, it’s always disappeared. But its fetid odor remains. It lingers in the cabin like a sweet-smelling, spreading infection.
“I don’t know what it wants from me. I want to leave, but with the storm raging outside, I’m stuck here, unable to get all the way back to town. The snow surrounds the cabin in mounds five feet high. I feel like a prisoner caged with a rabid beast, not knowing when it will strike.
“My wife claims she hasn’t seen or heard anything, but she keeps vanishing on me. Last night, she disappeared in the middle of a snowstorm. Where did she go? I asked her in the morning, but she said she was here the whole time. She didn’t remember anything. There’s no way she went into town. There wasn’t time and the trails were impassable that far down.
“Something’s going on here, but I don’t know what it is. I’m truly scared for our lives.”
I slammed the diary shut, not wanting to read anymore. I didn’t want to become infected by some kind of contagious cabin fever. If the last owner had gone insane in the mountains and started hallucinating naked corpses crawling around, I really didn’t want to know.
I shoved the diary back in the bookshelf, going for “The Maze of Death” instead. I tried to forget what I had read in the diary as I flew through the novella. All night, I tried to get the image of the naked, twisting man with rotted eyes out of my head, but I couldn’t.
I eventually fell asleep right before dawn. But, as my eyes were closing, I thought I saw a silhouette in the window- a starved man with excited, black eyes that seemed to be rotting out of his skull. I thought I saw him put his inhumanly long fingers against the glass as he leaned forward. I blinked, sitting up and glancing out into the white, snow-covered wonderland.
There was nothing there.
***
Another hunter occasionally followed the deer trails near my cabin. A frozen lake stood a quarter-mile away, the surface white and covered in thick drifts of snow. I bundled up, deciding to go outside for a hike in the frigid dawn. I strapped on my snowshoes and grabbed my shotgun, as I always did when I went outside. I never knew when a polar bear might be waiting around the next tree, after all.
I opened the door, seeing footprints pressed into the snow all around my house. At first, I thought it was that silhouette I had seen, the nightmarish thing from the diary. But the footprints didn’t go over to my window. They followed the trail twenty feet away, veering off towards the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill. I glanced down in that direction, seeing a black figure plodding slowly forward.
“Steve!” I cried, recognizing my only neighbor in a four-mile radius. He had a cabin about a mile away on his own little plot of land. He jumped, clearly startled by the sudden noise. His black snow pants and heavy fur coat swished together as he spun, raising his rifle high. When he saw me, he immediately lowered it and put a gloved hand up in a friendly greeting.
“Hey Josh! Surprised to see you up this early,” he yelled over the muted wintry landscape. Sounds always seemed different after it snowed, as if all the noise in the world had become faded and dead.
“Yeah, I’ve been having a little trouble sleeping,” I said, slinging my shotgun around my shoulder. “What are you doing anyway?”
“Just a little hunting, you know,” he said, giving me a sly wink. “Animals are always most active around dusk and dawn, it seems. That’s when I always have the best luck, anyway.” He stepped close to me, staring me in the eyes. “You do look like shit. Those bags under your eyes are big enough to carry groceries in.”
“Yeah, trust me, I know… Hey, this might sound a little weird, but did you know the previous owner of this cabin?” I asked. Steve’s wrinkled, old face fell into a scowl. His expression immediately became guarded and distant.
“Sure, sure, we met,” he exclaimed bluntly. He seemed to be searching my face for something, but I didn’t know what. His reaction left me feeling off-balance and nervous.
“Is he still around?” I said. Steve’s scowl deepened.
“Buddy, I don’t know what this is about, but he’s dead. He’s been dead. He died in that cabin, actually.” He pointed a finger at my home accusingly. With those words, my heart seemed to drop into my stomach. Waves of dread flowed through my body like water.
“How… how did he die? Like a heart attack or something?” I asked. Steve’s gaze turned downwards. He didn’t meet my eyes.
“Do you know that Alaska has the highest missing persons rate in the entire United States? It’s not even close. In fact, for the population size, we have far more people who go missing and never get found than anywhere else. They even have a name for it: the Alaska Triangle,” Steve said. “And we’re square in the middle of it.” I stared blankly at him, wondering where he was going with this. It seemed like a way to avoid answering my question.
“No, I didn’t know that…” I responded. Steve nodded, raising his head again. He heaved a deep sigh.
“Look, the thing with the last owner and his wife… it’s somewhat disturbing. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you, but it’s certainly not going to help your peace of mind. And it definitely isn’t going to help you get some sleep.”
“I want to know,” I insisted instantly. The wind started to whip past us. Flakes of ice and snow flew sideways in the sudden currents.
“Let’s go back to your cabin then,” Steve said, pulling his heavy fur-lined hood off and shaking out his long, black hair behind him. “I could use a bit of whiskey to warm up.”
***
We sat down with a bottle of Johnny Walker and two shot glasses. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but Steve certainly was. He chugged three shots in the span of a minute. I sipped at mine, drinking half and putting it back down on the coffee table with a thunk. Steve grunted, hissing through his open mouth for a moment.
“Ugh, that’s the good stuff,” he said, slamming his chest as the burning liquor worked its way down. Steve looked up at me with a new sparkle in his eyes. “Huh, so you want to know about what happened to Will Lenning. Well, I’ll tell you that no one really knows the whole story. I used to see him occasionally, come down and have a drink and talk. We all know each other around here, obviously.” I nodded, motioning him on. “He seemed like a normal, upstanding guy. He kinda reminded me of you, actually. A young guy trying to escape the hustle and bustle of the city life, the cancer of the American Dream.
“Well, he was here for maybe a couple months, I don’t know. Everything seemed fine. We used to go skeet shooting occasionally, have a beer, you know. We’d get together with a couple other hunters who live closer to town and sometimes play some poker. I never saw anything odd about Will. I never could have predicted what happened to him.” He heaved a long sigh at this, looking out the window at the sharp mountains with an expression of nostalgia.
“Well, what happened to him?” I asked, encouraging him to go on.
“He started talking about seeing someone peering in through his window at night. He talked about hearing sounds from under his bed while he was laying there in the dark- sounds like diseased breathing and shuffling. He started keeping all the lights on in his cabin twenty-four hours a day.” Steve leaned close to me. A glimmer of fear rippled across his pale, wrinkled face. “He started to lose his mind. Started digging holes all over the place, looking for something. Even in the middle of snowstorms, I would occasionally see him outside, digging. It seemed like he never slept anymore. It was classic cabin fever if I ever saw it.
“It was only a few weeks later that I came over here, concerned. I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, which was fairly unusual. I found the door hanging wide open. Propped up in a chair in the exact spot where you now sit, Will lay with a blast hole showing clear through his skull, a shotgun laying at his feet.
“And next to him, I found a blood-stained diary opened to the middle page. The last entry was stained with blood spatter, but still visible. I remember leaning down and reading it. It was only a few sentences long.” I glanced over at the bookshelf with the same diary, saying nothing.
“It said something like, ‘I see now what’s going on. The Twisted Man is leading me to the truth. Today, I will finally find it.’”
“And that was his suicide note?” I asked, my heart hammering in my chest. He nodded.
“Yeah. I went into town and got some rangers to come check it out. Eventually, they got cops and CSI there. They took all the stuff as evidence, including the diary,” he said. “Good riddance, I say. Reading something like that is never beneficial. Sometimes delusions spread like a virus, you know what I mean?” I did, but I said nothing. I glanced back at the diary, its black leather cover gleaming like a crouching snake.
And I wondered- if the police took the diary as evidence, how did it get back here?
***
“You said he had a wife living here with him, too?” I asked.
“Yeah… she went missing around the same time,” he said. “Pretty bizarre. The cops thought maybe she just moved away, but…” He shook his head grimly. “As far as I know, she was never seen again. It was like she had evaporated into thin air.”
After Steve left, I walked stiffly over to the bookshelf, taking down the diary. I flipped open through the pages. In the middle, I found the last entry. Spatters of old, darkened blood were scattered over the page like raindrops. I found the suicide note and read the date.
“January 27th, 2015,” it read. Will Lenning had not lived long after he started seeing the Twisted Man. I wondered if my fate would be the same.
The Sun had started to set outside as I sat with the diary at the small circular kitchen table, eating some stewed venison and rice as I read through the entries. At the end, Will Lenning said the Twisted Man had been trying to guide him somewhere, that, in fact, the Twisted Man had been trying to protect him from some great evil, rather than being the source of it.
I scoffed, feeling a flash of anger at his stupidity. His naivety obviously led to his death. But then a flash of insight struck me like lightning.
What if I was committing the same kind of stupidity? Perhaps I should just grab my gun and valuables and leave. I could take off on the snowmobile and be in town within a couple hours.
But, in my heart, I knew I would not. Something about the mystery of all this beckoned me to stay. Like a siren leading sailors to destruction, my curiosity called out to me, and I knew I would not be leaving that night. I needed answers.
And, sadly, I would find them.
***
I had fallen asleep with an empty bottle of beer in my hand. I sat in front of the TV, which only got satellite reception. There were, of course, no cable or phone lines threading their way through the forest. All of my power came from stored solar energy. Since I rarely watched TV and really only used it to cook or heat up water for bathing, the energy produced was sufficient even in winter. Tonight, though, I needed its sound, its mindless flashing of light and colors and canned laughter. It seemed to drive away the creeping, suffocating presence like a candle.
I woke suddenly. The TV flashed with static. The repetitive hissing of the white noise spit from the speakers like thousands of snakes. I glanced up at the clock. 3:33 AM. I looked around the dark cabin, confused for a long moment. I didn’t understand what had woken me so abruptly. The satellite had never gone out before, either, even with the howling winds and freezing hail of the Alaskan winter.
The TV started flickering as if the static were rising upwards. Black lines traced their way horizontally across the screen. The hissing deepened into a gurgle, and for a second, I thought I heard faint words behind the white noise. I thought I heard breathing, slow and diseased, like the death gasp of a drowning man.
A black line rose across the TV and an image came into view. The cabin was suddenly plunged into silence, except for the shrieking, wintry wind outside. I leaned close to the screen, confused at what I was looking at. It looked like a live camera feed of a room. As I took in the details, I realized it was my cabin. I saw myself in the chair, leaning close to the screen. I raised my hand, and the miniature version of me on the screen did likewise. Ice water seemed to drip down my spine as waves of dread coursed through my body.
“What the fuck is this?” I whispered, looking back to where the camera should be. It was just a coarse wooden ceiling in that corner. I turned back to the screen and nearly screamed.
The TV showed a pale, naked man crouching directly behind my chair now. With jerky movements, he rose, his broken spine twisting and shivering. A hissing voice rang out from the speakers. It spoke as if it had dirt and writhing maggots in its throat.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death,” it gurgled. “Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
Long, broken fingers with blackened nails reached out to touch my shoulders. I jumped out of the chair, stumbling back as I spun around in terror. My back smashed into the TV, and it fell to the floor with a shattering of glass and an explosion of light.
In those few moments before the darkness descended on me like a blanket, I thought I glimpsed a pale, sunken face with rotted, blackened eyes peeking out from behind the chair.
***
I turned on every light in the cabin, but there was no sign of the Twisted Man now. I knew I had to get out of there, though. I thought about the warning that the voice had spoken. If the creature wanted to attack me, then why hadn’t it just killed me while I was sleeping? None of it made sense. Who was watching me? The Twisted Man? And if he was, why warn me? Perhaps it was psychological warfare, I thought to myself. Perhaps the Twisted Man simply liked to play with his food before he ate it.
Thoughts raced through my head at a thousand miles an hour as I threw on snow pants and a couple heavy sweaters and coats. I covered up my entire body as much as I could to try to prevent frostbite. I had made up my mind to flee. There was no snowstorm tonight, though the entire landscape was blanketed in it and I knew the wind chill would be like an ice blade whipping against my skin. It was extremely dangerous to travel in the middle of the night like this in temperatures that might reach negative thirty degrees. Steve had been right, after all- Alaska had the highest missing persons rate of any state, and many of them were never found, their bodies likely frozen solid in the deep snow dozens of miles from the nearest town.
I grabbed my shotgun, jumped on my snowmobile and started heading to Steve’s cabin. I hoped I could wait there until the sunrise and then figure out what to do next.
But fate would take the decision out of my hands.
***
I felt like there were eyes watching me as I drove along the narrow, winding deer trail. The boughs of the evergreens reached into the path like greedy hands, grabbing at my coat and legs. More than a couple times, I thought I saw a pale, naked figure standing in the snow, but it had always gone when I turned to look.
I gave a sigh of relief when Steve’s place appeared in the distance. I could see the lights twinkling through the small windows of his log cabin. I pulled up next to his door, looking down. I saw two pairs of footprints there, one much smaller than the other. I found it odd, but shrugged it off. The snowmobile cut out with a sucking gurgle.
I knocked on the door hard a few times. Steve appeared after a few moments, groggy and half-dressed. He blinked slowly as he looked me up and down. His wrinkled face fell into a frown.
“Steve, I need a favor,” I said quickly. “Something weird is happening in my cabin. Can I stay here until morning, until maybe I can go to town or something? I can’t stay at my place tonight. I just can’t.” He nodded, yawning and motioning me in.
“You can sleep on the couch, I guess,” Steve said. “Put that shotgun somewhere safe, though, boy.” He had a partitioned bedroom in his cabin. It was significantly larger than my little one-room cabin, though it was basically still just a joint kitchen-living room, a small bedroom and a bathroom. He pointed to a well-worn couch in the corner and gave me an apathetic wave as he stumbled back into his bedroom, slamming the door.
I couldn’t sleep, though. I tiptoed around the room, looking at Steve’s bookshelf. He had a rather strange taste in books- lots of Anne Rule and true crime there. I saw dozens of books about Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Chase, Herbert Mullin, Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez among the collection. At the end, a large, black binder stood, unlabeled and worn-looking. It reminded me of the look of that leather-bound diary for a second, and my heart dropped. But logically, I knew this was just a coincidence. Yet, still, I pulled out the binder, my curiosity piqued.
What I found inside filled me with dread and horror.
Countless news clippings covered the length of it. The first clipping was from nearly twenty years earlier, about a woman who went missing in the Alaskan forest while hiking. A later one confirmed that her body was never found, and that her family was still hoping that she might turn up alive somewhere. A reward was offered for any information, it said.
And every page after that was more of the same: missing woman, murdered prostitute, missing man, no leads. I kept flipping through until I found clippings about Will Lenning’s suicide and the sudden disappearance of his wife. On the article about the suicide, Steve had used red marker to scrawl, “HA HA!” next to it.
I heard the click of a gun being cocked from behind me. I froze as Steve’s voice traveled across the room like a whisper.
“How do you like my work, friend?” he asked, his tone jovial and mocking.
***
I still held the binder of horrors tightly in my hands as I stared open-mouthed at this man I thought I knew.
“It’s you? What, you killed Will Lenning and his wife? And a lot of other women, apparently.” Everything felt unreal, as if I were stuck in a dream. Steve’s grin spread across his face, but his blue eyes stayed cold and dead.
“Yes, well, she was cheating on him with me anyway. Just another whore, you know. They always get what’s coming to them in the end,” he hissed with hatred oozing from his voice. “It’s too bad, really. I just killed another slut tonight. I was planning on saving you for later. The urge isn’t too bad yet right now, after all. It comes in cycles, you see. It comes in waves…” I saw a glimmer of pale, naked flesh writhing behind Steve. With jerky movements, the Twisted Man came up behind him. I said nothing, just watching with wide-eyed horror and amazement.
“You need help, man,” I whispered. Steve laughed.
“Help? The only help they give people like me is a needle in the arm. You know that. That’s why it’s important to always cover your tracks…” The Twisted Man ran a long, broken finger across Steve’s neck. Steve gave a strangled cry and jumped. He spun around, screaming. I glanced over at my shotgun next to the couch.
I jumped for it as Steve turned back to me, firing his pistol twice. The first bullet soared high above me, raining wood splinters down on my head, but the second ripped into my leg. A cold, burning pain ran like fire up my shin. I screamed in agony and battle fury as I gripped the shotgun, spinning and firing.
Steve’s head exploded as the slug ripped through his brain. His forehead collapsed like a smashed melon as bone splinters and blood sprayed the wall behind him.
The Twisted Man stood there, hunched over, grinning up at me. I felt warm blood gushing from my leg as I stared back at him, breathing hard. I wondered if I was dying.
“You… you weren’t after me at all, were you?” I asked. “You were after… Steve.” But the Twisted Man said nothing. After a long moment, he slinked back into the shadows of the bedroom and disappeared.
***
As night crawled its way toward morning, I thought back to the words the Twisted Man had spoken through the TV, suddenly understanding everything.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death. Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
He hadn’t been trying to hurt me at all. He had been trying to warn me. He had probably tried to warn Will Lenning and his wife, too.
I wrapped my leg in gauze, gritting my teeth. The wound looked puckered and deep, but I could still move my foot, and the bullet had gone clean through the flesh. I poured alcohol on it, screaming in pain as it burned its way through my skin. After rummaging through Steve’s bathroom, I found some prescription painkillers and swallowed a handful of them with a beer. I knew I would need the opiate high to get through the pain of riding into town with a mutilated leg.
As the Sun finally rose, I made my way outside the blood-stained floors of the cabin to my snowmobile. Before I left, I glanced back at that horrid place, the scene of so much torment and death.
In the open doorway, the Twisted Man stood, his back hunched, his rotted lips grinning at me. His hand lifted up into the air with jerky movements and waved.
I waved back as I started the engine and headed into town.

A few years ago, I decided I needed a major life change. Everything seemed to be going downhill- my finances, my mental health, my life. I would go weeks without sleeping sometimes as the heavy traffic passed through the city streets down below. Every time I went outside, I saw more homeless people, more needles and crack pipes littering the ground, more muggings and assaults and overdoses and deaths. The city had become a wasteland, and I knew it was time to leave.
I had no girlfriend, no wife, no kids. My parents had both died a few years prior and I barely talked to my siblings anymore. I had nothing to tie me down to this place where I felt like I was dying inside a little more each day.
That was when I sold nearly everything I owned, got in my car and drove up to Alaska to try starting anew. I bought a small cabin and a plot of land in the middle of its majestic mountains and dark, enchanting forests. In the winter, the Northern Lights would shine through like the eyes of God, sending out divine trails of light that danced through the sky in cosmic waves.
And while the move did help give me some peace of mind, in the end, the source of all my problems had ultimately followed me thousands of miles into this endless wilderness. It would take me a long time to realize the cause of all this misery was myself.
Because, as a wise man once said, “Wherever I go, there I am.”
***
I lived in that cabin for three months without any major issues other than the constant threat of bears, moose and wolves. I had a rifle and a shotgun for hunting, a small garden in the backyard and a solar panel to generate electricity.
“This is the life,” I said, relaxing on a hammock I had strung across the corner of the cabin while staring at the endless beauty directly outside the window. White-capped mountains loomed like giants in front of thick clusters of evergreens. A virgin covering of fluffy snow made the entire world glisten and sparkle. There wasn’t a house or road in sight.
“No work, no stress, no pollution, no cars honking all the time…” I closed my eyes, breathing in the clean air. I ended up falling asleep for a couple hours, waking up just as the Sun had started setting. Bright orange streaks mixed with the bloody smears of the fading light as it disappeared behind the mountains.
I groggily arose, stumbling over to make a cup of instant coffee. As I sipped it, I wandered around the room, looking for something to pass the time. There were still quite a few random objects left behind by the last owner that I hadn’t gotten rid of yet. I had moved in to find a stocked bookshelf filled with classics by Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Bored, I started rifling through the collection, looking for something good to pass the time. As I shuffled past “A Maze of Death” and “Ubik”, something caught my eye.
A black, leather-bound book with no title or author name stood there, its cover faded with time and wear. Curious, I pulled it out and opened it. I saw the cursive scrawled across the pages in a neat, copperplate script and realized it was a diary left behind by the previous owner. The first entry was dated “January 9th, 2015.” This is what it said.
***
“I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not. I went into town to talk to my therapist yesterday and she said I should try writing everything down. She talks to me like it’s all in my head. But I know it’s not.
“When I first moved into the cabin, it seemed like Paradise. I never thought in a million years that something would be slinking around at night. I never thought it would be hiding under my bed, peeking in windows and following me like a shadow.
“Right now, I’m snowed in with a cup of coffee in one hand and my pistol in the other. I can’t sleep anymore. I keep hearing something shuffling around under the bed. Sometimes, I think I even hear ragged breathing, as if a corpse with dirt in its lungs had come back to life.
“I’ve caught glimpses of that thing in the darkness. Whatever it is, its skin is loose, almost falling off the bone. It almost looks like a naked, emaciated man. Its eyes are rotted and dark, its back hunched, its spine twisted and jutting out like tumors. It moves in this slow, jerky way, but I can never seem to catch it. Its body seems broken and out of alignment. Its legs bend the wrong way sometimes.
“By the time I turn on the lights or try to take a video of it, it’s always disappeared. But its fetid odor remains. It lingers in the cabin like a sweet-smelling, spreading infection.
“I don’t know what it wants from me. I want to leave, but with the storm raging outside, I’m stuck here, unable to get all the way back to town. The snow surrounds the cabin in mounds five feet high. I feel like a prisoner caged with a rabid beast, not knowing when it will strike.
“My wife claims she hasn’t seen or heard anything, but she keeps vanishing on me. Last night, she disappeared in the middle of a snowstorm. Where did she go? I asked her in the morning, but she said she was here the whole time. She didn’t remember anything. There’s no way she went into town. There wasn’t time and the trails were impassable that far down.
“Something’s going on here, but I don’t know what it is. I’m truly scared for our lives.”
I slammed the diary shut, not wanting to read anymore. I didn’t want to become infected by some kind of contagious cabin fever. If the last owner had gone insane in the mountains and started hallucinating naked corpses crawling around, I really didn’t want to know.
I shoved the diary back in the bookshelf, going for “A Maze of Death” instead. I tried to forget what I had read in the diary as I flew through the novella. All night, I tried to get the image of the naked, twisting man with rotted eyes out of my head, but I couldn’t.
I eventually fell asleep right before dawn. But, as my eyes were closing, I thought I saw a silhouette in the window- a starved man with excited, black eyes that seemed to be rotting out of his skull. I thought I saw him put his inhumanly long fingers against the glass as he leaned forward. I blinked, sitting up and glancing out into the white, snow-covered wonderland.
There was nothing there.
***
Another hunter occasionally followed the deer trails near my cabin. A frozen lake stood a quarter-mile away, the surface white and covered in thick drifts of snow. I bundled up, deciding to go outside for a hike in the frigid dawn. I strapped on my snowshoes and grabbed my shotgun, as I always did when I went outside. I never knew when a polar bear might be waiting around the next tree, after all.
I opened the door, seeing footprints pressed into the snow all around my house. At first, I thought it was that silhouette I had seen, the nightmarish thing from the diary. But the footprints didn’t go over to my window. They followed the trail twenty feet away, veering off towards the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill. I glanced down in that direction, seeing a black figure plodding slowly forward.
“Steve!” I cried, recognizing my only neighbor in a four-mile radius. He had a cabin about a mile away on his own little plot of land. He jumped, clearly startled by the sudden noise. His black snow pants and heavy fur coat swished together as he spun, raising his rifle high. When he saw me, he immediately lowered it and put a gloved hand up in a friendly greeting.
“Hey Josh! Surprised to see you up this early,” he yelled over the muted wintry landscape. Sounds always seemed different after it snowed, as if all the noise in the world had become faded and dead.
“Yeah, I’ve been having a little trouble sleeping,” I said, slinging my shotgun around my shoulder. “What are you doing anyway?”
“Just a little hunting, you know,” he said, giving me a sly wink. “Animals are always most active around dusk and dawn, it seems. That’s when I always have the best luck, anyway.” He stepped close to me, staring me in the eyes. “You do look like shit. Those bags under your eyes are big enough to carry groceries in.”
“Yeah, trust me, I know… Hey, this might sound a little weird, but did you know the previous owner of this cabin?” I asked. Steve’s wrinkled, old face fell into a scowl. His expression immediately became guarded and distant.
“Sure, sure, we met,” he exclaimed bluntly. He seemed to be searching my face for something, but I didn’t know what. His reaction left me feeling off-balance and nervous.
“Is he still around?” I said. Steve’s scowl deepened.
“Buddy, I don’t know what this is about, but he’s dead. He’s been dead. He died in that cabin, actually.” He pointed a finger at my home accusingly. With those words, my heart seemed to drop into my stomach. Waves of dread flowed through my body like water.
“How… how did he die? Like a heart attack or something?” I asked. Steve’s gaze turned downwards. He didn’t meet my eyes.
“Do you know that Alaska has the highest missing persons rate in the entire United States? It’s not even close. In fact, for the population size, we have far more people who go missing and never get found than anywhere else. They even have a name for it: the Alaska Triangle,” Steve said. “And we’re square in the middle of it.” I stared blankly at him, wondering where he was going with this. It seemed like a way to avoid answering my question.
“No, I didn’t know that…” I responded. Steve nodded, raising his head again. He heaved a deep sigh.
“Look, the thing with the last owner and his wife… it’s somewhat disturbing. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you, but it’s certainly not going to help your peace of mind. And it definitely isn’t going to help you get some sleep.”
“I want to know,” I insisted instantly. The wind started to whip past us. Flakes of ice and snow flew sideways in the sudden currents.
“Let’s go back to your cabin then,” Steve said, pulling his heavy fur-lined hood off and shaking out his long, black hair behind him. “I could use a bit of whiskey to warm up.”
***
We sat down with a bottle of Johnny Walker and two shot glasses. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but Steve certainly was. He chugged three shots in the span of a minute. I sipped at mine, drinking half and putting it back down on the coffee table with a thunk. Steve grunted, hissing through his open mouth for a moment.
“Ugh, that’s the good stuff,” he said, slamming his chest as the burning liquor worked its way down. Steve looked up at me with a new sparkle in his eyes. “Huh, so you want to know about what happened to Will Lenning. Well, I’ll tell you that no one really knows the whole story. I used to see him occasionally, come down and have a drink and talk. We all know each other around here, obviously.” I nodded, motioning him on. “He seemed like a normal, upstanding guy. He kinda reminded me of you, actually. A young guy trying to escape the hustle and bustle of the city life, the cancer of the American Dream.
“Well, he was here for maybe a couple months, I don’t know. Everything seemed fine. We used to go skeet shooting occasionally, have a beer, you know. We’d get together with a couple other hunters who live closer to town and sometimes play some poker. I never saw anything odd about Will. I never could have predicted what happened to him.” He heaved a long sigh at this, looking out the window at the sharp mountains with an expression of nostalgia.
“Well, what happened to him?” I asked, encouraging him to go on.
“He started talking about seeing someone peering in through his window at night. He talked about hearing sounds from under his bed while he was laying there in the dark- sounds like diseased breathing and shuffling. He started keeping all the lights on in his cabin twenty-four hours a day.” Steve leaned close to me. A glimmer of fear rippled across his pale, wrinkled face. “He started to lose his mind. Started digging holes all over the place, looking for something. Even in the middle of snowstorms, I would occasionally see him outside, digging. It seemed like he never slept anymore. It was classic cabin fever if I ever saw it.
“It was only a few weeks later that I came over here, concerned. I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, which was fairly unusual. I found the door hanging wide open. Propped up in a chair in the exact spot where you now sit, Will lay with a blast hole showing clear through his skull, a shotgun laying at his feet.
“And next to him, I found a blood-stained diary opened to the middle page. The last entry was stained with blood spatter, but still visible. I remember leaning down and reading it. It was only a few sentences long.” I glanced over at the bookshelf with the same diary, saying nothing.
“It said something like, ‘I see now what’s going on. The Twisted Man is leading me to the truth. Today, I will finally find it.’”
“And that was his suicide note?” I asked, my heart hammering in my chest. He nodded.
“Yeah. I went into town and got some rangers to come check it out. Eventually, they got cops and CSI there. They took all the stuff as evidence, including the diary,” he said. “Good riddance, I say. Reading something like that is never beneficial. Sometimes delusions spread like a virus, you know what I mean?” I did, but I said nothing. I glanced back at the diary, its black leather cover gleaming like a crouching snake.
And I wondered- if the police took the diary as evidence, how did it get back here?
***
“You said he had a wife living here with him, too?” I asked.
“Yeah… she went missing around the same time,” he said. “Pretty bizarre. The cops thought maybe she just moved away, but…” He shook his head grimly. “As far as I know, she was never seen again. It was like she had evaporated into thin air.”
After Steve left, I walked stiffly over to the bookshelf, taking down the diary. I flipped open through the pages. In the middle, I found the last entry. Spatters of old, darkened blood were scattered over the page like raindrops. I found the suicide note and read the date.
“January 27th, 2015,” it read. Will Lenning had not lived long after he started seeing the Twisted Man. I wondered if my fate would be the same.
The Sun had started to set outside as I sat with the diary at the small circular kitchen table, eating some stewed venison and rice as I read through the entries. At the end, Will Lenning said the Twisted Man had been trying to guide him somewhere, that, in fact, the Twisted Man had been trying to protect him from some great evil, rather than being the source of it.
I scoffed, feeling a flash of anger at his stupidity. His naivety obviously led to his death. But then a flash of insight struck me like lightning.
What if I was committing the same kind of stupidity? Perhaps I should just grab my gun and valuables and leave. I could take off on the snowmobile and be in town within a couple hours.
But, in my heart, I knew I would not. Something about the mystery of all this beckoned me to stay. Like a siren leading sailors to destruction, my curiosity called out to me, and I knew I would not be leaving that night. I needed answers.
And, sadly, I would find them.
***
I had fallen asleep with an empty bottle of beer in my hand. I sat in front of the TV, which only got satellite reception. There were, of course, no cable or phone lines threading their way through the forest. All of my power came from stored solar energy. Since I rarely watched TV and really only used it to cook or heat up water for bathing, the energy produced was sufficient even in winter. Tonight, though, I needed its sound, its mindless flashing of light and colors and canned laughter. It seemed to drive away the creeping, suffocating presence like a candle.
I woke suddenly. The TV flashed with static. The repetitive hissing of the white noise spit from the speakers like thousands of snakes. I glanced up at the clock. 3:33 AM. I looked around the dark cabin, confused for a long moment. I didn’t understand what had woken me so abruptly. The satellite had never gone out before, either, even with the howling winds and freezing hail of the Alaskan winter.
The TV started flickering as if the static were rising upwards. Black lines traced their way horizontally across the screen. The hissing deepened into a gurgle, and for a second, I thought I heard faint words behind the white noise. I thought I heard breathing, slow and diseased, like the death gasp of a drowning man.
A black line rose across the TV and an image came into view. The cabin was suddenly plunged into silence, except for the shrieking, wintry wind outside. I leaned close to the screen, confused at what I was looking at. It looked like a live camera feed of a room. As I took in the details, I realized it was my cabin. I saw myself in the chair, leaning close to the screen. I raised my hand, and the miniature version of me on the screen did likewise. Ice water seemed to drip down my spine as waves of dread coursed through my body.
“What the fuck is this?” I whispered, looking back to where the camera should be. It was just a coarse wooden ceiling in that corner. I turned back to the screen and nearly screamed.
The TV showed a pale, naked man crouching directly behind my chair now. With jerky movements, he rose, his broken spine twisting and shivering. A hissing voice rang out from the speakers. It spoke as if it had dirt and writhing maggots in its throat.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death,” it gurgled. “Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
Long, broken fingers with blackened nails reached out to touch my shoulders. I jumped out of the chair, stumbling back as I spun around in terror. My back smashed into the TV, and it fell to the floor with a shattering of glass and an explosion of light.
In those few moments before the darkness descended on me like a blanket, I thought I glimpsed a pale, sunken face with rotted, blackened eyes peeking out from behind the chair.
***
I turned on every light in the cabin, but there was no sign of the Twisted Man now. I knew I had to get out of there, though. I thought about the warning that the voice had spoken. If the creature wanted to attack me, then why hadn’t it just killed me while I was sleeping? None of it made sense. Who was watching me? The Twisted Man? And if he was, why warn me? Perhaps it was psychological warfare, I thought to myself. Perhaps the Twisted Man simply liked to play with his food before he ate it.
Thoughts raced through my head at a thousand miles an hour as I threw on snow pants and a couple heavy sweaters and coats. I covered up my entire body as much as I could to try to prevent frostbite. I had made up my mind to flee. There was no snowstorm tonight, though the entire landscape was blanketed in it and I knew the wind chill would be like an ice blade whipping against my skin. It was extremely dangerous to travel in the middle of the night like this in temperatures that might reach negative thirty degrees. Steve had been right, after all- Alaska had the highest missing persons rate of any state, and many of them were never found, their bodies likely frozen solid in the deep snow dozens of miles from the nearest town.
I grabbed my shotgun, jumped on my snowmobile and started heading to Steve’s cabin. I hoped I could wait there until the sunrise and then figure out what to do next.
But fate would take the decision out of my hands.
***
I felt like there were eyes watching me as I drove along the narrow, winding deer trail. The boughs of the evergreens reached into the path like greedy hands, grabbing at my coat and legs. More than a couple times, I thought I saw a pale, naked figure standing in the snow, but it had always gone when I turned to look.
I gave a sigh of relief when Steve’s place appeared in the distance. I could see the lights twinkling through the small windows of his log cabin. I pulled up next to his door, looking down. I saw two pairs of footprints there, one much smaller than the other. I found it odd, but shrugged it off. The snowmobile cut out with a sucking gurgle.
I knocked on the door hard a few times. Steve appeared after a few moments, groggy and half-dressed. He blinked slowly as he looked me up and down. His wrinkled face fell into a frown.
“Steve, I need a favor,” I said quickly. “Something weird is happening in my cabin. Can I stay here until morning, until maybe I can go to town or something? I can’t stay at my place tonight. I just can’t.” He nodded, yawning and motioning me in.
“You can sleep on the couch, I guess,” Steve said. “Put that shotgun somewhere safe, though, boy.” He had a partitioned bedroom in his cabin. It was significantly larger than my little one-room cabin, though it was basically still just a joint kitchen-living room, a small bedroom and a bathroom. He pointed to a well-worn couch in the corner and gave me an apathetic wave as he stumbled back into his bedroom, slamming the door.
I couldn’t sleep, though. I tiptoed around the room, looking at Steve’s bookshelf. He had a rather strange taste in books- lots of Anne Rule and true crime there. I saw dozens of books about Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Chase, Herbert Mullin, Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez among the collection. At the end, a large, black binder stood, unlabeled and worn-looking. It reminded me of the look of that leather-bound diary for a second, and my heart dropped. But logically, I knew this was just a coincidence. Yet, still, I pulled out the binder, my curiosity piqued.
What I found inside filled me with dread and horror.
Countless news clippings covered the length of it. The first clipping was from nearly twenty years earlier, about a woman who went missing in the Alaskan forest while hiking. A later one confirmed that her body was never found, and that her family was still hoping that she might turn up alive somewhere. A reward was offered for any information, it said.
And every page after that was more of the same: missing woman, murdered prostitute, missing man, no leads. I kept flipping through until I found clippings about Will Lenning’s suicide and the sudden disappearance of his wife. On the article about the suicide, Steve had used red marker to scrawl, “HA HA!” next to it.
I heard the click of a gun being cocked from behind me. I froze as Steve’s voice traveled across the room like a whisper.
“How do you like my work, friend?” he asked, his tone jovial and mocking.
***
I still held the binder of horrors tightly in my hands as I stared open-mouthed at this man I thought I knew.
“It’s you? What, you killed Will Lenning and his wife? And a lot of other women, apparently.” Everything felt unreal, as if I were stuck in a dream. Steve’s grin spread across his face, but his blue eyes stayed cold and dead.
“Yes, well, she was cheating on him with me anyway. Just another whore, you know. They always get what’s coming to them in the end,” he hissed with hatred oozing from his voice. “It’s too bad, really. I just killed another slut tonight. I was planning on saving you for later. The urge isn’t too bad yet right now, after all. It comes in cycles, you see. It comes in waves…” I saw a glimmer of pale, naked flesh writhing behind Steve. With jerky movements, the Twisted Man came up behind him. I said nothing, just watching with wide-eyed horror and amazement.
“You need help, man,” I whispered. Steve laughed.
“Help? The only help they give people like me is a needle in the arm. You know that. That’s why it’s important to always cover your tracks…” The Twisted Man ran a long, broken finger across Steve’s neck. Steve gave a strangled cry and jumped. He spun around, screaming. I glanced over at my shotgun next to the couch.
I jumped for it as Steve turned back to me, firing his pistol twice. The first bullet soared high above me, raining wood splinters down on my head, but the second ripped into my leg. A cold, burning pain ran like fire up my shin. I screamed in agony and battle fury as I gripped the shotgun, spinning and firing.
Steve’s head exploded as the slug ripped through his brain. His forehead collapsed like a smashed melon as bone splinters and blood sprayed the wall behind him.
The Twisted Man stood there, hunched over, grinning up at me. I felt warm blood gushing from my leg as I stared back at him, breathing hard. I wondered if I was dying.
“You… you weren’t after me at all, were you?” I asked. “You were after… Steve.” But the Twisted Man said nothing. After a long moment, he slinked back into the shadows of the bedroom and disappeared.
***
As night crawled its way toward morning, I thought back to the words the Twisted Man had spoken through the TV, suddenly understanding everything.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death. Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
He hadn’t been trying to hurt me at all. He had been trying to warn me. He had probably tried to warn Will Lenning and his wife, too.
I wrapped my leg in gauze, gritting my teeth. The wound looked puckered and deep, but I could still move my foot, and the bullet had gone clean through the flesh. I poured alcohol on it, screaming in pain as it burned its way through my skin. After rummaging through Steve’s bathroom, I found some prescription painkillers and swallowed a handful of them with a beer. I knew I would need the opiate high to get through the pain of riding into town with a mutilated leg.
As the Sun finally rose, I made my way outside the blood-stained floors of the cabin to my snowmobile. Before I left, I glanced back at that horrid place, the scene of so much torment and death.
In the open doorway, the Twisted Man stood, his back hunched, his rotted lips grinning at me. His hand lifted up into the air with jerky movements and waved.
I waved back as I started the engine and headed into town.

A few years ago, I decided I needed a major life change. Everything seemed to be going downhill- my finances, my mental health, my life. I would go weeks without sleeping sometimes as the heavy traffic passed through the city streets down below. Every time I went outside, I saw more homeless people, more needles and crack pipes littering the ground, more muggings and assaults and overdoses and deaths. The city had become a wasteland, and I knew it was time to leave.
I had no girlfriend, no wife, no kids. My parents had both died a few years prior and I barely talked to my siblings anymore. I had nothing to tie me down to this place where I felt like I was dying inside a little more each day.
That was when I sold nearly everything I owned, got in my car and drove up to Alaska to try starting anew. I bought a small cabin and a plot of land in the middle of its majestic mountains and dark, enchanting forests. In the winter, the Northern Lights would shine through like the eyes of God, sending out divine trails of light that danced through the sky in cosmic waves.
And while the move did help give me some peace of mind, in the end, the source of all my problems had ultimately followed me thousands of miles into this endless wilderness. It would take me a long time to realize the cause of all this misery was myself.
Because, as a wise man once said, “Wherever I go, there I am.”
***
I lived in that cabin for three months without any major issues other than the constant threat of bears, moose and wolves. I had a rifle and a shotgun for hunting, a small garden in the backyard and a solar panel to generate electricity.
“This is the life,” I said, relaxing on a hammock I had strung across the corner of the cabin while staring at the endless beauty directly outside the window. White-capped mountains loomed like giants in front of thick clusters of evergreens. A virgin covering of fluffy snow made the entire world glisten and sparkle. There wasn’t a house or road in sight.
“No work, no stress, no pollution, no cars honking all the time…” I closed my eyes, breathing in the clean air. I ended up falling asleep for a couple hours, waking up just as the Sun had started setting. Bright orange streaks mixed with the bloody smears of the fading light as it disappeared behind the mountains.
I groggily arose, stumbling over to make a cup of instant coffee. As I sipped it, I wandered around the room, looking for something to pass the time. There were still quite a few random objects left behind by the last owner that I hadn’t gotten rid of yet. I had moved in to find a stocked bookshelf filled with classics by Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Bored, I started rifling through the collection, looking for something good to pass the time. As I shuffled past “The Maze of Death” and “Ubik”, something caught my eye.
A black, leather-bound book with no title or author name stood there, its cover faded with time and wear. Curious, I pulled it out and opened it. I saw the cursive scrawled across the pages in a neat, copperplate script and realized it was a diary left behind by the previous owner. The first entry was dated “January 9th, 2015.” This is what it said.
***
“I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not. I went into town to talk to my therapist yesterday and she said I should try writing everything down. She talks to me like it’s all in my head. But I know it’s not.
“When I first moved into the cabin, it seemed like Paradise. I never thought in a million years that something would be slinking around at night. I never thought it would be hiding under my bed, peeking in windows and following me like a shadow.
“Right now, I’m snowed in with a cup of coffee in one hand and my pistol in the other. I can’t sleep anymore. I keep hearing something shuffling around under the bed. Sometimes, I think I even hear ragged breathing, as if a corpse with dirt in its lungs had come back to life.
“I’ve caught glimpses of that thing in the darkness. Whatever it is, its skin is loose, almost falling off the bone. It almost looks like a naked, emaciated man. Its eyes are rotted and dark, its back hunched, its spine twisted and jutting out like tumors. It moves in this slow, jerky way, but I can never seem to catch it. Its body seems broken and out of alignment. Its legs bend the wrong way sometimes.
“By the time I turn on the lights or try to take a video of it, it’s always disappeared. But its fetid odor remains. It lingers in the cabin like a sweet-smelling, spreading infection.
“I don’t know what it wants from me. I want to leave, but with the storm raging outside, I’m stuck here, unable to get all the way back to town. The snow surrounds the cabin in mounds five feet high. I feel like a prisoner caged with a rabid beast, not knowing when it will strike.
“My wife claims she hasn’t seen or heard anything, but she keeps vanishing on me. Last night, she disappeared in the middle of a snowstorm. Where did she go? I asked her in the morning, but she said she was here the whole time. She didn’t remember anything. There’s no way she went into town. There wasn’t time and the trails were impassable that far down.
“Something’s going on here, but I don’t know what it is. I’m truly scared for our lives.”
I slammed the diary shut, not wanting to read anymore. I didn’t want to become infected by some kind of contagious cabin fever. If the last owner had gone insane in the mountains and started hallucinating naked corpses crawling around, I really didn’t want to know.
I shoved the diary back in the bookshelf, going for “The Maze of Death” instead. I tried to forget what I had read in the diary as I flew through the novella. All night, I tried to get the image of the naked, twisting man with rotted eyes out of my head, but I couldn’t.
I eventually fell asleep right before dawn. But, as my eyes were closing, I thought I saw a silhouette in the window- a starved man with excited, black eyes that seemed to be rotting out of his skull. I thought I saw him put his inhumanly long fingers against the glass as he leaned forward. I blinked, sitting up and glancing out into the white, snow-covered wonderland.
There was nothing there.
***
Another hunter occasionally followed the deer trails near my cabin. A frozen lake stood a quarter-mile away, the surface white and covered in thick drifts of snow. I bundled up, deciding to go outside for a hike in the frigid dawn. I strapped on my snowshoes and grabbed my shotgun, as I always did when I went outside. I never knew when a polar bear might be waiting around the next tree, after all.
I opened the door, seeing footprints pressed into the snow all around my house. At first, I thought it was that silhouette I had seen, the nightmarish thing from the diary. But the footprints didn’t go over to my window. They followed the trail twenty feet away, veering off towards the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill. I glanced down in that direction, seeing a black figure plodding slowly forward.
“Steve!” I cried, recognizing my only neighbor in a four-mile radius. He had a cabin about a mile away on his own little plot of land. He jumped, clearly startled by the sudden noise. His black snow pants and heavy fur coat swished together as he spun, raising his rifle high. When he saw me, he immediately lowered it and put a gloved hand up in a friendly greeting.
“Hey Josh! Surprised to see you up this early,” he yelled over the muted wintry landscape. Sounds always seemed different after it snowed, as if all the noise in the world had become faded and dead.
“Yeah, I’ve been having a little trouble sleeping,” I said, slinging my shotgun around my shoulder. “What are you doing anyway?”
“Just a little hunting, you know,” he said, giving me a sly wink. “Animals are always most active around dusk and dawn, it seems. That’s when I always have the best luck, anyway.” He stepped close to me, staring me in the eyes. “You do look like shit. Those bags under your eyes are big enough to carry groceries in.”
“Yeah, trust me, I know… Hey, this might sound a little weird, but did you know the previous owner of this cabin?” I asked. Steve’s wrinkled, old face fell into a scowl. His expression immediately became guarded and distant.
“Sure, sure, we met,” he exclaimed bluntly. He seemed to be searching my face for something, but I didn’t know what. His reaction left me feeling off-balance and nervous.
“Is he still around?” I said. Steve’s scowl deepened.
“Buddy, I don’t know what this is about, but he’s dead. He’s been dead. He died in that cabin, actually.” He pointed a finger at my home accusingly. With those words, my heart seemed to drop into my stomach. Waves of dread flowed through my body like water.
“How… how did he die? Like a heart attack or something?” I asked. Steve’s gaze turned downwards. He didn’t meet my eyes.
“Do you know that Alaska has the highest missing persons rate in the entire United States? It’s not even close. In fact, for the population size, we have far more people who go missing and never get found than anywhere else. They even have a name for it: the Alaska Triangle,” Steve said. “And we’re square in the middle of it.” I stared blankly at him, wondering where he was going with this. It seemed like a way to avoid answering my question.
“No, I didn’t know that…” I responded. Steve nodded, raising his head again. He heaved a deep sigh.
“Look, the thing with the last owner and his wife… it’s somewhat disturbing. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you, but it’s certainly not going to help your peace of mind. And it definitely isn’t going to help you get some sleep.”
“I want to know,” I insisted instantly. The wind started to whip past us. Flakes of ice and snow flew sideways in the sudden currents.
“Let’s go back to your cabin then,” Steve said, pulling his heavy fur-lined hood off and shaking out his long, black hair behind him. “I could use a bit of whiskey to warm up.”
***
We sat down with a bottle of Johnny Walker and two shot glasses. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but Steve certainly was. He chugged three shots in the span of a minute. I sipped at mine, drinking half and putting it back down on the coffee table with a thunk. Steve grunted, hissing through his open mouth for a moment.
“Ugh, that’s the good stuff,” he said, slamming his chest as the burning liquor worked its way down. Steve looked up at me with a new sparkle in his eyes. “Huh, so you want to know about what happened to Will Lenning. Well, I’ll tell you that no one really knows the whole story. I used to see him occasionally, come down and have a drink and talk. We all know each other around here, obviously.” I nodded, motioning him on. “He seemed like a normal, upstanding guy. He kinda reminded me of you, actually. A young guy trying to escape the hustle and bustle of the city life, the cancer of the American Dream.
“Well, he was here for maybe a couple months, I don’t know. Everything seemed fine. We used to go skeet shooting occasionally, have a beer, you know. We’d get together with a couple other hunters who live closer to town and sometimes play some poker. I never saw anything odd about Will. I never could have predicted what happened to him.” He heaved a long sigh at this, looking out the window at the sharp mountains with an expression of nostalgia.
“Well, what happened to him?” I asked, encouraging him to go on.
“He started talking about seeing someone peering in through his window at night. He talked about hearing sounds from under his bed while he was laying there in the dark- sounds like diseased breathing and shuffling. He started keeping all the lights on in his cabin twenty-four hours a day.” Steve leaned close to me. A glimmer of fear rippled across his pale, wrinkled face. “He started to lose his mind. Started digging holes all over the place, looking for something. Even in the middle of snowstorms, I would occasionally see him outside, digging. It seemed like he never slept anymore. It was classic cabin fever if I ever saw it.
“It was only a few weeks later that I came over here, concerned. I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, which was fairly unusual. I found the door hanging wide open. Propped up in a chair in the exact spot where you now sit, Will lay with a blast hole showing clear through his skull, a shotgun laying at his feet.
“And next to him, I found a blood-stained diary opened to the middle page. The last entry was stained with blood spatter, but still visible. I remember leaning down and reading it. It was only a few sentences long.” I glanced over at the bookshelf with the same diary, saying nothing.
“It said something like, ‘I see now what’s going on. The Twisted Man is leading me to the truth. Today, I will finally find it.’”
“And that was his suicide note?” I asked, my heart hammering in my chest. He nodded.
“Yeah. I went into town and got some rangers to come check it out. Eventually, they got cops and CSI there. They took all the stuff as evidence, including the diary,” he said. “Good riddance, I say. Reading something like that is never beneficial. Sometimes delusions spread like a virus, you know what I mean?” I did, but I said nothing. I glanced back at the diary, its black leather cover gleaming like a crouching snake.
And I wondered- if the police took the diary as evidence, how did it get back here?
***
“You said he had a wife living here with him, too?” I asked.
“Yeah… she went missing around the same time,” he said. “Pretty bizarre. The cops thought maybe she just moved away, but…” He shook his head grimly. “As far as I know, she was never seen again. It was like she had evaporated into thin air.”
After Steve left, I walked stiffly over to the bookshelf, taking down the diary. I flipped open through the pages. In the middle, I found the last entry. Spatters of old, darkened blood were scattered over the page like raindrops. I found the suicide note and read the date.
“January 27th, 2015,” it read. Will Lenning had not lived long after he started seeing the Twisted Man. I wondered if my fate would be the same.
The Sun had started to set outside as I sat with the diary at the small circular kitchen table, eating some stewed venison and rice as I read through the entries. At the end, Will Lenning said the Twisted Man had been trying to guide him somewhere, that, in fact, the Twisted Man had been trying to protect him from some great evil, rather than being the source of it.
I scoffed, feeling a flash of anger at his stupidity. His naivety obviously led to his death. But then a flash of insight struck me like lightning.
What if I was committing the same kind of stupidity? Perhaps I should just grab my gun and valuables and leave. I could take off on the snowmobile and be in town within a couple hours.
But, in my heart, I knew I would not. Something about the mystery of all this beckoned me to stay. Like a siren leading sailors to destruction, my curiosity called out to me, and I knew I would not be leaving that night. I needed answers.
And, sadly, I would find them.
***
I had fallen asleep with an empty bottle of beer in my hand. I sat in front of the TV, which only got satellite reception. There were, of course, no cable or phone lines threading their way through the forest. All of my power came from stored solar energy. Since I rarely watched TV and really only used it to cook or heat up water for bathing, the energy produced was sufficient even in winter. Tonight, though, I needed its sound, its mindless flashing of light and colors and canned laughter. It seemed to drive away the creeping, suffocating presence like a candle.
I woke suddenly. The TV flashed with static. The repetitive hissing of the white noise spit from the speakers like thousands of snakes. I glanced up at the clock. 3:33 AM. I looked around the dark cabin, confused for a long moment. I didn’t understand what had woken me so abruptly. The satellite had never gone out before, either, even with the howling winds and freezing hail of the Alaskan winter.
The TV started flickering as if the static were rising upwards. Black lines traced their way horizontally across the screen. The hissing deepened into a gurgle, and for a second, I thought I heard faint words behind the white noise. I thought I heard breathing, slow and diseased, like the death gasp of a drowning man.
A black line rose across the TV and an image came into view. The cabin was suddenly plunged into silence, except for the shrieking, wintry wind outside. I leaned close to the screen, confused at what I was looking at. It looked like a live camera feed of a room. As I took in the details, I realized it was my cabin. I saw myself in the chair, leaning close to the screen. I raised my hand, and the miniature version of me on the screen did likewise. Ice water seemed to drip down my spine as waves of dread coursed through my body.
“What the fuck is this?” I whispered, looking back to where the camera should be. It was just a coarse wooden ceiling in that corner. I turned back to the screen and nearly screamed.
The TV showed a pale, naked man crouching directly behind my chair now. With jerky movements, he rose, his broken spine twisting and shivering. A hissing voice rang out from the speakers. It spoke as if it had dirt and writhing maggots in its throat.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death,” it gurgled. “Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
Long, broken fingers with blackened nails reached out to touch my shoulders. I jumped out of the chair, stumbling back as I spun around in terror. My back smashed into the TV, and it fell to the floor with a shattering of glass and an explosion of light.
In those few moments before the darkness descended on me like a blanket, I thought I glimpsed a pale, sunken face with rotted, blackened eyes peeking out from behind the chair.
***
I turned on every light in the cabin, but there was no sign of the Twisted Man now. I knew I had to get out of there, though. I thought about the warning that the voice had spoken. If the creature wanted to attack me, then why hadn’t it just killed me while I was sleeping? None of it made sense. Who was watching me? The Twisted Man? And if he was, why warn me? Perhaps it was psychological warfare, I thought to myself. Perhaps the Twisted Man simply liked to play with his food before he ate it.
Thoughts raced through my head at a thousand miles an hour as I threw on snow pants and a couple heavy sweaters and coats. I covered up my entire body as much as I could to try to prevent frostbite. I had made up my mind to flee. There was no snowstorm tonight, though the entire landscape was blanketed in it and I knew the wind chill would be like an ice blade whipping against my skin. It was extremely dangerous to travel in the middle of the night like this in temperatures that might reach negative thirty degrees. Steve had been right, after all- Alaska had the highest missing persons rate of any state, and many of them were never found, their bodies likely frozen solid in the deep snow dozens of miles from the nearest town.
I grabbed my shotgun, jumped on my snowmobile and started heading to Steve’s cabin. I hoped I could wait there until the sunrise and then figure out what to do next.
But fate would take the decision out of my hands.
***
I felt like there were eyes watching me as I drove along the narrow, winding deer trail. The boughs of the evergreens reached into the path like greedy hands, grabbing at my coat and legs. More than a couple times, I thought I saw a pale, naked figure standing in the snow, but it had always gone when I turned to look.
I gave a sigh of relief when Steve’s place appeared in the distance. I could see the lights twinkling through the small windows of his log cabin. I pulled up next to his door, looking down. I saw two pairs of footprints there, one much smaller than the other. I found it odd, but shrugged it off. The snowmobile cut out with a sucking gurgle.
I knocked on the door hard a few times. Steve appeared after a few moments, groggy and half-dressed. He blinked slowly as he looked me up and down. His wrinkled face fell into a frown.
“Steve, I need a favor,” I said quickly. “Something weird is happening in my cabin. Can I stay here until morning, until maybe I can go to town or something? I can’t stay at my place tonight. I just can’t.” He nodded, yawning and motioning me in.
“You can sleep on the couch, I guess,” Steve said. “Put that shotgun somewhere safe, though, boy.” He had a partitioned bedroom in his cabin. It was significantly larger than my little one-room cabin, though it was basically still just a joint kitchen-living room, a small bedroom and a bathroom. He pointed to a well-worn couch in the corner and gave me an apathetic wave as he stumbled back into his bedroom, slamming the door.
I couldn’t sleep, though. I tiptoed around the room, looking at Steve’s bookshelf. He had a rather strange taste in books- lots of Anne Rule and true crime there. I saw dozens of books about Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Chase, Herbert Mullin, Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez among the collection. At the end, a large, black binder stood, unlabeled and worn-looking. It reminded me of the look of that leather-bound diary for a second, and my heart dropped. But logically, I knew this was just a coincidence. Yet, still, I pulled out the binder, my curiosity piqued.
What I found inside filled me with dread and horror.
Countless news clippings covered the length of it. The first clipping was from nearly twenty years earlier, about a woman who went missing in the Alaskan forest while hiking. A later one confirmed that her body was never found, and that her family was still hoping that she might turn up alive somewhere. A reward was offered for any information, it said.
And every page after that was more of the same: missing woman, murdered prostitute, missing man, no leads. I kept flipping through until I found clippings about Will Lenning’s suicide and the sudden disappearance of his wife. On the article about the suicide, Steve had used red marker to scrawl, “HA HA!” next to it.
I heard the click of a gun being cocked from behind me. I froze as Steve’s voice traveled across the room like a whisper.
“How do you like my work, friend?” he asked, his tone jovial and mocking.
***
I still held the binder of horrors tightly in my hands as I stared open-mouthed at this man I thought I knew.
“It’s you? What, you killed Will Lenning and his wife? And a lot of other women, apparently.” Everything felt unreal, as if I were stuck in a dream. Steve’s grin spread across his face, but his blue eyes stayed cold and dead.
“Yes, well, she was cheating on him with me anyway. Just another whore, you know. They always get what’s coming to them in the end,” he hissed with hatred oozing from his voice. “It’s too bad, really. I just killed another slut tonight. I was planning on saving you for later. The urge isn’t too bad yet right now, after all. It comes in cycles, you see. It comes in waves…” I saw a glimmer of pale, naked flesh writhing behind Steve. With jerky movements, the Twisted Man came up behind him. I said nothing, just watching with wide-eyed horror and amazement.
“You need help, man,” I whispered. Steve laughed.
“Help? The only help they give people like me is a needle in the arm. You know that. That’s why it’s important to always cover your tracks…” The Twisted Man ran a long, broken finger across Steve’s neck. Steve gave a strangled cry and jumped. He spun around, screaming. I glanced over at my shotgun next to the couch.
I jumped for it as Steve turned back to me, firing his pistol twice. The first bullet soared high above me, raining wood splinters down on my head, but the second ripped into my leg. A cold, burning pain ran like fire up my shin. I screamed in agony and battle fury as I gripped the shotgun, spinning and firing.
Steve’s head exploded as the slug ripped through his brain. His forehead collapsed like a smashed melon as bone splinters and blood sprayed the wall behind him.
The Twisted Man stood there, hunched over, grinning up at me. I felt warm blood gushing from my leg as I stared back at him, breathing hard. I wondered if I was dying.
“You… you weren’t after me at all, were you?” I asked. “You were after… Steve.” But the Twisted Man said nothing. After a long moment, he slinked back into the shadows of the bedroom and disappeared.
***
As night crawled its way toward morning, I thought back to the words the Twisted Man had spoken through the TV, suddenly understanding everything.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death. Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
He hadn’t been trying to hurt me at all. He had been trying to warn me. He had probably tried to warn Will Lenning and his wife, too.
I wrapped my leg in gauze, gritting my teeth. The wound looked puckered and deep, but I could still move my foot, and the bullet had gone clean through the flesh. I poured alcohol on it, screaming in pain as it burned its way through my skin. After rummaging through Steve’s bathroom, I found some prescription painkillers and swallowed a handful of them with a beer. I knew I would need the opiate high to get through the pain of riding into town with a mutilated leg.
As the Sun finally rose, I made my way outside the blood-stained floors of the cabin to my snowmobile. Before I left, I glanced back at that horrid place, the scene of so much torment and death.
In the open doorway, the Twisted Man stood, his back hunched, his rotted lips grinning at me. His hand lifted up into the air with jerky movements and waved.
I waved back as I started the engine and headed into town.

A few years ago, I decided I needed a major life change. Everything seemed to be going downhill- my finances, my mental health, my life. I would go weeks without sleeping sometimes as the heavy traffic passed through the city streets down below. Every time I went outside, I saw more homeless people, more needles and crack pipes littering the ground, more muggings and assaults and overdoses and deaths. The city had become a wasteland, and I knew it was time to leave.
I had no girlfriend, no wife, no kids. My parents had both died a few years prior and I barely talked to my siblings anymore. I had nothing to tie me down to this place where I felt like I was dying inside a little more each day.
That was when I sold nearly everything I owned, got in my car and drove up to Alaska to try starting anew. I bought a small cabin and a plot of land in the middle of its majestic mountains and dark, enchanting forests. In the winter, the Northern Lights would shine through like the eyes of God, sending out divine trails of light that danced through the sky in cosmic waves.
And while the move did help give me some peace of mind, in the end, the source of all my problems had ultimately followed me thousands of miles into this endless wilderness. It would take me a long time to realize the cause of all this misery was myself.
Because, as a wise man once said, “Wherever I go, there I am.”
***
I lived in that cabin for three months without any major issues other than the constant threat of bears, moose and wolves. I had a rifle and a shotgun for hunting, a small garden in the backyard and a solar panel to generate electricity.
“This is the life,” I said, relaxing on a hammock I had strung across the corner of the cabin while staring at the endless beauty directly outside the window. White-capped mountains loomed like giants in front of thick clusters of evergreens. A virgin covering of fluffy snow made the entire world glisten and sparkle. There wasn’t a house or road in sight.
“No work, no stress, no pollution, no cars honking all the time…” I closed my eyes, breathing in the clean air. I ended up falling asleep for a couple hours, waking up just as the Sun had started setting. Bright orange streaks mixed with the bloody smears of the fading light as it disappeared behind the mountains.
I groggily arose, stumbling over to make a cup of instant coffee. As I sipped it, I wandered around the room, looking for something to pass the time. There were still quite a few random objects left behind by the last owner that I hadn’t gotten rid of yet. I had moved in to find a stocked bookshelf filled with classics by Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Bored, I started rifling through the collection, looking for something good to pass the time. As I shuffled past “A Maze of Death” and “Ubik”, something caught my eye.
A black, leather-bound book with no title or author name stood there, its cover faded with time and wear. Curious, I pulled it out and opened it. I saw the cursive scrawled across the pages in a neat, copperplate script and realized it was a diary left behind by the previous owner. The first entry was dated “January 9th, 2015.” This is what it said.
***
“I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not. I went into town to talk to my therapist yesterday and she said I should try writing everything down. She talks to me like it’s all in my head. But I know it’s not.
“When I first moved into the cabin, it seemed like Paradise. I never thought in a million years that something would be slinking around at night. I never thought it would be hiding under my bed, peeking in windows and following me like a shadow.
“Right now, I’m snowed in with a cup of coffee in one hand and my pistol in the other. I can’t sleep anymore. I keep hearing something shuffling around under the bed. Sometimes, I think I even hear ragged breathing, as if a corpse with dirt in its lungs had come back to life.
“I’ve caught glimpses of that thing in the darkness. Whatever it is, its skin is loose, almost falling off the bone. It almost looks like a naked, emaciated man. Its eyes are rotted and dark, its back hunched, its spine twisted and jutting out like tumors. It moves in this slow, jerky way, but I can never seem to catch it. Its body seems broken and out of alignment. Its legs bend the wrong way sometimes.
“By the time I turn on the lights or try to take a video of it, it’s always disappeared. But its fetid odor remains. It lingers in the cabin like a sweet-smelling, spreading infection.
“I don’t know what it wants from me. I want to leave, but with the storm raging outside, I’m stuck here, unable to get all the way back to town. The snow surrounds the cabin in mounds five feet high. I feel like a prisoner caged with a rabid beast, not knowing when it will strike.
“My wife claims she hasn’t seen or heard anything, but she keeps vanishing on me. Last night, she disappeared in the middle of a snowstorm. Where did she go? I asked her in the morning, but she said she was here the whole time. She didn’t remember anything. There’s no way she went into town. There wasn’t time and the trails were impassable that far down.
“Something’s going on here, but I don’t know what it is. I’m truly scared for our lives.”
I slammed the diary shut, not wanting to read anymore. I didn’t want to become infected by some kind of contagious cabin fever. If the last owner had gone insane in the mountains and started hallucinating naked corpses crawling around, I really didn’t want to know.
I shoved the diary back in the bookshelf, going for “A Maze of Death” instead. I tried to forget what I had read in the diary as I flew through the novella. All night, I tried to get the image of the naked, twisting man with rotted eyes out of my head, but I couldn’t.
I eventually fell asleep right before dawn. But, as my eyes were closing, I thought I saw a silhouette in the window- a starved man with excited, black eyes that seemed to be rotting out of his skull. I thought I saw him put his inhumanly long fingers against the glass as he leaned forward. I blinked, sitting up and glancing out into the white, snow-covered wonderland.
There was nothing there.
***
Another hunter occasionally followed the deer trails near my cabin. A frozen lake stood a quarter-mile away, the surface white and covered in thick drifts of snow. I bundled up, deciding to go outside for a hike in the frigid dawn. I strapped on my snowshoes and grabbed my shotgun, as I always did when I went outside. I never knew when a polar bear might be waiting around the next tree, after all.
I opened the door, seeing footprints pressed into the snow all around my house. At first, I thought it was that silhouette I had seen, the nightmarish thing from the diary. But the footprints didn’t go over to my window. They followed the trail twenty feet away, veering off towards the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill. I glanced down in that direction, seeing a black figure plodding slowly forward.
“Steve!” I cried, recognizing my only neighbor in a four-mile radius. He had a cabin about a mile away on his own little plot of land. He jumped, clearly startled by the sudden noise. His black snow pants and heavy fur coat swished together as he spun, raising his rifle high. When he saw me, he immediately lowered it and put a gloved hand up in a friendly greeting.
“Hey Josh! Surprised to see you up this early,” he yelled over the muted wintry landscape. Sounds always seemed different after it snowed, as if all the noise in the world had become faded and dead.
“Yeah, I’ve been having a little trouble sleeping,” I said, slinging my shotgun around my shoulder. “What are you doing anyway?”
“Just a little hunting, you know,” he said, giving me a sly wink. “Animals are always most active around dusk and dawn, it seems. That’s when I always have the best luck, anyway.” He stepped close to me, staring me in the eyes. “You do look like shit. Those bags under your eyes are big enough to carry groceries in.”
“Yeah, trust me, I know… Hey, this might sound a little weird, but did you know the previous owner of this cabin?” I asked. Steve’s wrinkled, old face fell into a scowl. His expression immediately became guarded and distant.
“Sure, sure, we met,” he exclaimed bluntly. He seemed to be searching my face for something, but I didn’t know what. His reaction left me feeling off-balance and nervous.
“Is he still around?” I said. Steve’s scowl deepened.
“Buddy, I don’t know what this is about, but he’s dead. He’s been dead. He died in that cabin, actually.” He pointed a finger at my home accusingly. With those words, my heart seemed to drop into my stomach. Waves of dread flowed through my body like water.
“How… how did he die? Like a heart attack or something?” I asked. Steve’s gaze turned downwards. He didn’t meet my eyes.
“Do you know that Alaska has the highest missing persons rate in the entire United States? It’s not even close. In fact, for the population size, we have far more people who go missing and never get found than anywhere else. They even have a name for it: the Alaska Triangle,” Steve said. “And we’re square in the middle of it.” I stared blankly at him, wondering where he was going with this. It seemed like a way to avoid answering my question.
“No, I didn’t know that…” I responded. Steve nodded, raising his head again. He heaved a deep sigh.
“Look, the thing with the last owner and his wife… it’s somewhat disturbing. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you, but it’s certainly not going to help your peace of mind. And it definitely isn’t going to help you get some sleep.”
“I want to know,” I insisted instantly. The wind started to whip past us. Flakes of ice and snow flew sideways in the sudden currents.
“Let’s go back to your cabin then,” Steve said, pulling his heavy fur-lined hood off and shaking out his long, black hair behind him. “I could use a bit of whiskey to warm up.”
***
We sat down with a bottle of Johnny Walker and two shot glasses. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but Steve certainly was. He chugged three shots in the span of a minute. I sipped at mine, drinking half and putting it back down on the coffee table with a thunk. Steve grunted, hissing through his open mouth for a moment.
“Ugh, that’s the good stuff,” he said, slamming his chest as the burning liquor worked its way down. Steve looked up at me with a new sparkle in his eyes. “Huh, so you want to know about what happened to Will Lenning. Well, I’ll tell you that no one really knows the whole story. I used to see him occasionally, come down and have a drink and talk. We all know each other around here, obviously.” I nodded, motioning him on. “He seemed like a normal, upstanding guy. He kinda reminded me of you, actually. A young guy trying to escape the hustle and bustle of the city life, the cancer of the American Dream.
“Well, he was here for maybe a couple months, I don’t know. Everything seemed fine. We used to go skeet shooting occasionally, have a beer, you know. We’d get together with a couple other hunters who live closer to town and sometimes play some poker. I never saw anything odd about Will. I never could have predicted what happened to him.” He heaved a long sigh at this, looking out the window at the sharp mountains with an expression of nostalgia.
“Well, what happened to him?” I asked, encouraging him to go on.
“He started talking about seeing someone peering in through his window at night. He talked about hearing sounds from under his bed while he was laying there in the dark- sounds like diseased breathing and shuffling. He started keeping all the lights on in his cabin twenty-four hours a day.” Steve leaned close to me. A glimmer of fear rippled across his pale, wrinkled face. “He started to lose his mind. Started digging holes all over the place, looking for something. Even in the middle of snowstorms, I would occasionally see him outside, digging. It seemed like he never slept anymore. It was classic cabin fever if I ever saw it.
“It was only a few weeks later that I came over here, concerned. I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, which was fairly unusual. I found the door hanging wide open. Propped up in a chair in the exact spot where you now sit, Will lay with a blast hole showing clear through his skull, a shotgun laying at his feet.
“And next to him, I found a blood-stained diary opened to the middle page. The last entry was stained with blood spatter, but still visible. I remember leaning down and reading it. It was only a few sentences long.” I glanced over at the bookshelf with the same diary, saying nothing.
“It said something like, ‘I see now what’s going on. The Twisted Man is leading me to the truth. Today, I will finally find it.’”
“And that was his suicide note?” I asked, my heart hammering in my chest. He nodded.
“Yeah. I went into town and got some rangers to come check it out. Eventually, they got cops and CSI there. They took all the stuff as evidence, including the diary,” he said. “Good riddance, I say. Reading something like that is never beneficial. Sometimes delusions spread like a virus, you know what I mean?” I did, but I said nothing. I glanced back at the diary, its black leather cover gleaming like a crouching snake.
And I wondered- if the police took the diary as evidence, how did it get back here?
***
“You said he had a wife living here with him, too?” I asked.
“Yeah… she went missing around the same time,” he said. “Pretty bizarre. The cops thought maybe she just moved away, but…” He shook his head grimly. “As far as I know, she was never seen again. It was like she had evaporated into thin air.”
After Steve left, I walked stiffly over to the bookshelf, taking down the diary. I flipped open through the pages. In the middle, I found the last entry. Spatters of old, darkened blood were scattered over the page like raindrops. I found the suicide note and read the date.
“January 27th, 2015,” it read. Will Lenning had not lived long after he started seeing the Twisted Man. I wondered if my fate would be the same.
The Sun had started to set outside as I sat with the diary at the small circular kitchen table, eating some stewed venison and rice as I read through the entries. At the end, Will Lenning said the Twisted Man had been trying to guide him somewhere, that, in fact, the Twisted Man had been trying to protect him from some great evil, rather than being the source of it.
I scoffed, feeling a flash of anger at his stupidity. His naivety obviously led to his death. But then a flash of insight struck me like lightning.
What if I was committing the same kind of stupidity? Perhaps I should just grab my gun and valuables and leave. I could take off on the snowmobile and be in town within a couple hours.
But, in my heart, I knew I would not. Something about the mystery of all this beckoned me to stay. Like a siren leading sailors to destruction, my curiosity called out to me, and I knew I would not be leaving that night. I needed answers.
And, sadly, I would find them.
***
I had fallen asleep with an empty bottle of beer in my hand. I sat in front of the TV, which only got satellite reception. There were, of course, no cable or phone lines threading their way through the forest. All of my power came from stored solar energy. Since I rarely watched TV and really only used it to cook or heat up water for bathing, the energy produced was sufficient even in winter. Tonight, though, I needed its sound, its mindless flashing of light and colors and canned laughter. It seemed to drive away the creeping, suffocating presence like a candle.
I woke suddenly. The TV flashed with static. The repetitive hissing of the white noise spit from the speakers like thousands of snakes. I glanced up at the clock. 3:33 AM. I looked around the dark cabin, confused for a long moment. I didn’t understand what had woken me so abruptly. The satellite had never gone out before, either, even with the howling winds and freezing hail of the Alaskan winter.
The TV started flickering as if the static were rising upwards. Black lines traced their way horizontally across the screen. The hissing deepened into a gurgle, and for a second, I thought I heard faint words behind the white noise. I thought I heard breathing, slow and diseased, like the death gasp of a drowning man.
A black line rose across the TV and an image came into view. The cabin was suddenly plunged into silence, except for the shrieking, wintry wind outside. I leaned close to the screen, confused at what I was looking at. It looked like a live camera feed of a room. As I took in the details, I realized it was my cabin. I saw myself in the chair, leaning close to the screen. I raised my hand, and the miniature version of me on the screen did likewise. Ice water seemed to drip down my spine as waves of dread coursed through my body.
“What the fuck is this?” I whispered, looking back to where the camera should be. It was just a coarse wooden ceiling in that corner. I turned back to the screen and nearly screamed.
The TV showed a pale, naked man crouching directly behind my chair now. With jerky movements, he rose, his broken spine twisting and shivering. A hissing voice rang out from the speakers. It spoke as if it had dirt and writhing maggots in its throat.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death,” it gurgled. “Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
Long, broken fingers with blackened nails reached out to touch my shoulders. I jumped out of the chair, stumbling back as I spun around in terror. My back smashed into the TV, and it fell to the floor with a shattering of glass and an explosion of light.
In those few moments before the darkness descended on me like a blanket, I thought I glimpsed a pale, sunken face with rotted, blackened eyes peeking out from behind the chair.
***
I turned on every light in the cabin, but there was no sign of the Twisted Man now. I knew I had to get out of there, though. I thought about the warning that the voice had spoken. If the creature wanted to attack me, then why hadn’t it just killed me while I was sleeping? None of it made sense. Who was watching me? The Twisted Man? And if he was, why warn me? Perhaps it was psychological warfare, I thought to myself. Perhaps the Twisted Man simply liked to play with his food before he ate it.
Thoughts raced through my head at a thousand miles an hour as I threw on snow pants and a couple heavy sweaters and coats. I covered up my entire body as much as I could to try to prevent frostbite. I had made up my mind to flee. There was no snowstorm tonight, though the entire landscape was blanketed in it and I knew the wind chill would be like an ice blade whipping against my skin. It was extremely dangerous to travel in the middle of the night like this in temperatures that might reach negative thirty degrees. Steve had been right, after all- Alaska had the highest missing persons rate of any state, and many of them were never found, their bodies likely frozen solid in the deep snow dozens of miles from the nearest town.
I grabbed my shotgun, jumped on my snowmobile and started heading to Steve’s cabin. I hoped I could wait there until the sunrise and then figure out what to do next.
But fate would take the decision out of my hands.
***
I felt like there were eyes watching me as I drove along the narrow, winding deer trail. The boughs of the evergreens reached into the path like greedy hands, grabbing at my coat and legs. More than a couple times, I thought I saw a pale, naked figure standing in the snow, but it had always gone when I turned to look.
I gave a sigh of relief when Steve’s place appeared in the distance. I could see the lights twinkling through the small windows of his log cabin. I pulled up next to his door, looking down. I saw two pairs of footprints there, one much smaller than the other. I found it odd, but shrugged it off. The snowmobile cut out with a sucking gurgle.
I knocked on the door hard a few times. Steve appeared after a few moments, groggy and half-dressed. He blinked slowly as he looked me up and down. His wrinkled face fell into a frown.
“Steve, I need a favor,” I said quickly. “Something weird is happening in my cabin. Can I stay here until morning, until maybe I can go to town or something? I can’t stay at my place tonight. I just can’t.” He nodded, yawning and motioning me in.
“You can sleep on the couch, I guess,” Steve said. “Put that shotgun somewhere safe, though, boy.” He had a partitioned bedroom in his cabin. It was significantly larger than my little one-room cabin, though it was basically still just a joint kitchen-living room, a small bedroom and a bathroom. He pointed to a well-worn couch in the corner and gave me an apathetic wave as he stumbled back into his bedroom, slamming the door.
I couldn’t sleep, though. I tiptoed around the room, looking at Steve’s bookshelf. He had a rather strange taste in books- lots of Anne Rule and true crime there. I saw dozens of books about Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Chase, Herbert Mullin, Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez among the collection. At the end, a large, black binder stood, unlabeled and worn-looking. It reminded me of the look of that leather-bound diary for a second, and my heart dropped. But logically, I knew this was just a coincidence. Yet, still, I pulled out the binder, my curiosity piqued.
What I found inside filled me with dread and horror.
Countless news clippings covered the length of it. The first clipping was from nearly twenty years earlier, about a woman who went missing in the Alaskan forest while hiking. A later one confirmed that her body was never found, and that her family was still hoping that she might turn up alive somewhere. A reward was offered for any information, it said.
And every page after that was more of the same: missing woman, murdered prostitute, missing man, no leads. I kept flipping through until I found clippings about Will Lenning’s suicide and the sudden disappearance of his wife. On the article about the suicide, Steve had used red marker to scrawl, “HA HA!” next to it.
I heard the click of a gun being cocked from behind me. I froze as Steve’s voice traveled across the room like a whisper.
“How do you like my work, friend?” he asked, his tone jovial and mocking.
***
I still held the binder of horrors tightly in my hands as I stared open-mouthed at this man I thought I knew.
“It’s you? What, you killed Will Lenning and his wife? And a lot of other women, apparently.” Everything felt unreal, as if I were stuck in a dream. Steve’s grin spread across his face, but his blue eyes stayed cold and dead.
“Yes, well, she was cheating on him with me anyway. Just another whore, you know. They always get what’s coming to them in the end,” he hissed with hatred oozing from his voice. “It’s too bad, really. I just killed another slut tonight. I was planning on saving you for later. The urge isn’t too bad yet right now, after all. It comes in cycles, you see. It comes in waves…” I saw a glimmer of pale, naked flesh writhing behind Steve. With jerky movements, the Twisted Man came up behind him. I said nothing, just watching with wide-eyed horror and amazement.
“You need help, man,” I whispered. Steve laughed.
“Help? The only help they give people like me is a needle in the arm. You know that. That’s why it’s important to always cover your tracks…” The Twisted Man ran a long, broken finger across Steve’s neck. Steve gave a strangled cry and jumped. He spun around, screaming. I glanced over at my shotgun next to the couch.
I jumped for it as Steve turned back to me, firing his pistol twice. The first bullet soared high above me, raining wood splinters down on my head, but the second ripped into my leg. A cold, burning pain ran like fire up my shin. I screamed in agony and battle fury as I gripped the shotgun, spinning and firing.
Steve’s head exploded as the slug ripped through his brain. His forehead collapsed like a smashed melon as bone splinters and blood sprayed the wall behind him.
The Twisted Man stood there, hunched over, grinning up at me. I felt warm blood gushing from my leg as I stared back at him, breathing hard. I wondered if I was dying.
“You… you weren’t after me at all, were you?” I asked. “You were after… Steve.” But the Twisted Man said nothing. After a long moment, he slinked back into the shadows of the bedroom and disappeared.
***
As night crawled its way toward morning, I thought back to the words the Twisted Man had spoken through the TV, suddenly understanding everything.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death. Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
He hadn’t been trying to hurt me at all. He had been trying to warn me. He had probably tried to warn Will Lenning and his wife, too.
I wrapped my leg in gauze, gritting my teeth. The wound looked puckered and deep, but I could still move my foot, and the bullet had gone clean through the flesh. I poured alcohol on it, screaming in pain as it burned its way through my skin. After rummaging through Steve’s bathroom, I found some prescription painkillers and swallowed a handful of them with a beer. I knew I would need the opiate high to get through the pain of riding into town with a mutilated leg.
As the Sun finally rose, I made my way outside the blood-stained floors of the cabin to my snowmobile. Before I left, I glanced back at that horrid place, the scene of so much torment and death.
In the open doorway, the Twisted Man stood, his back hunched, his rotted lips grinning at me. His hand lifted up into the air with jerky movements and waved.
I waved back as I started the engine and headed into town.

A few years ago, I decided I needed a major life change. Everything seemed to be going downhill- my finances, my mental health, my life. I would go weeks without sleeping sometimes as the heavy traffic passed through the city streets down below. Every time I went outside, I saw more homeless people, more needles and crack pipes littering the ground, more muggings and assaults and overdoses and deaths. The city had become a wasteland, and I knew it was time to leave.
I had no girlfriend, no wife, no kids. My parents had both died a few years prior and I barely talked to my siblings anymore. I had nothing to tie me down to this place where I felt like I was dying inside a little more each day.
That was when I sold nearly everything I owned, got in my car and drove up to Alaska to try starting anew. I bought a small cabin and a plot of land in the middle of its majestic mountains and dark, enchanting forests. In the winter, the Northern Lights would shine through like the eyes of God, sending out divine trails of light that danced through the sky in cosmic waves.
And while the move did help give me some peace of mind, in the end, the source of all my problems had ultimately followed me thousands of miles into this endless wilderness. It would take me a long time to realize the cause of all this misery was myself.
Because, as a wise man once said, “Wherever I go, there I am.”
***
I lived in that cabin for three months without any major issues other than the constant threat of bears, moose and wolves. I had a rifle and a shotgun for hunting, a small garden in the backyard and a solar panel to generate electricity.
“This is the life,” I said, relaxing on a hammock I had strung across the corner of the cabin while staring at the endless beauty directly outside the window. White-capped mountains loomed like giants in front of thick clusters of evergreens. A virgin covering of fluffy snow made the entire world glisten and sparkle. There wasn’t a house or road in sight.
“No work, no stress, no pollution, no cars honking all the time…” I closed my eyes, breathing in the clean air. I ended up falling asleep for a couple hours, waking up just as the Sun had started setting. Bright orange streaks mixed with the bloody smears of the fading light as it disappeared behind the mountains.
I groggily arose, stumbling over to make a cup of instant coffee. As I sipped it, I wandered around the room, looking for something to pass the time. There were still quite a few random objects left behind by the last owner that I hadn’t gotten rid of yet. I had moved in to find a stocked bookshelf filled with classics by Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Bored, I started rifling through the collection, looking for something good to pass the time. As I shuffled past “The Maze of Death” and “Ubik”, something caught my eye.
A black, leather-bound book with no title or author name stood there, its cover faded with time and wear. Curious, I pulled it out and opened it. I saw the cursive scrawled across the pages in a neat, copperplate script and realized it was a diary left behind by the previous owner. The first entry was dated “January 9th, 2015.” This is what it said.
***
“I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not. I went into town to talk to my therapist yesterday and she said I should try writing everything down. She talks to me like it’s all in my head. But I know it’s not.
“When I first moved into the cabin, it seemed like Paradise. I never thought in a million years that something would be slinking around at night. I never thought it would be hiding under my bed, peeking in windows and following me like a shadow.
“Right now, I’m snowed in with a cup of coffee in one hand and my pistol in the other. I can’t sleep anymore. I keep hearing something shuffling around under the bed. Sometimes, I think I even hear ragged breathing, as if a corpse with dirt in its lungs had come back to life.
“I’ve caught glimpses of that thing in the darkness. Whatever it is, its skin is loose, almost falling off the bone. It almost looks like a naked, emaciated man. Its eyes are rotted and dark, its back hunched, its spine twisted and jutting out like tumors. It moves in this slow, jerky way, but I can never seem to catch it. Its body seems broken and out of alignment. Its legs bend the wrong way sometimes.
“By the time I turn on the lights or try to take a video of it, it’s always disappeared. But its fetid odor remains. It lingers in the cabin like a sweet-smelling, spreading infection.
“I don’t know what it wants from me. I want to leave, but with the storm raging outside, I’m stuck here, unable to get all the way back to town. The snow surrounds the cabin in mounds five feet high. I feel like a prisoner caged with a rabid beast, not knowing when it will strike.
“My wife claims she hasn’t seen or heard anything, but she keeps vanishing on me. Last night, she disappeared in the middle of a snowstorm. Where did she go? I asked her in the morning, but she said she was here the whole time. She didn’t remember anything. There’s no way she went into town. There wasn’t time and the trails were impassable that far down.
“Something’s going on here, but I don’t know what it is. I’m truly scared for our lives.”
I slammed the diary shut, not wanting to read anymore. I didn’t want to become infected by some kind of contagious cabin fever. If the last owner had gone insane in the mountains and started hallucinating naked corpses crawling around, I really didn’t want to know.
I shoved the diary back in the bookshelf, going for “The Maze of Death” instead. I tried to forget what I had read in the diary as I flew through the novella. All night, I tried to get the image of the naked, twisting man with rotted eyes out of my head, but I couldn’t.
I eventually fell asleep right before dawn. But, as my eyes were closing, I thought I saw a silhouette in the window- a starved man with excited, black eyes that seemed to be rotting out of his skull. I thought I saw him put his inhumanly long fingers against the glass as he leaned forward. I blinked, sitting up and glancing out into the white, snow-covered wonderland.
There was nothing there.
***
Another hunter occasionally followed the deer trails near my cabin. A frozen lake stood a quarter-mile away, the surface white and covered in thick drifts of snow. I bundled up, deciding to go outside for a hike in the frigid dawn. I strapped on my snowshoes and grabbed my shotgun, as I always did when I went outside. I never knew when a polar bear might be waiting around the next tree, after all.
I opened the door, seeing footprints pressed into the snow all around my house. At first, I thought it was that silhouette I had seen, the nightmarish thing from the diary. But the footprints didn’t go over to my window. They followed the trail twenty feet away, veering off towards the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill. I glanced down in that direction, seeing a black figure plodding slowly forward.
“Steve!” I cried, recognizing my only neighbor in a four-mile radius. He had a cabin about a mile away on his own little plot of land. He jumped, clearly startled by the sudden noise. His black snow pants and heavy fur coat swished together as he spun, raising his rifle high. When he saw me, he immediately lowered it and put a gloved hand up in a friendly greeting.
“Hey Josh! Surprised to see you up this early,” he yelled over the muted wintry landscape. Sounds always seemed different after it snowed, as if all the noise in the world had become faded and dead.
“Yeah, I’ve been having a little trouble sleeping,” I said, slinging my shotgun around my shoulder. “What are you doing anyway?”
“Just a little hunting, you know,” he said, giving me a sly wink. “Animals are always most active around dusk and dawn, it seems. That’s when I always have the best luck, anyway.” He stepped close to me, staring me in the eyes. “You do look like shit. Those bags under your eyes are big enough to carry groceries in.”
“Yeah, trust me, I know… Hey, this might sound a little weird, but did you know the previous owner of this cabin?” I asked. Steve’s wrinkled, old face fell into a scowl. His expression immediately became guarded and distant.
“Sure, sure, we met,” he exclaimed bluntly. He seemed to be searching my face for something, but I didn’t know what. His reaction left me feeling off-balance and nervous.
“Is he still around?” I said. Steve’s scowl deepened.
“Buddy, I don’t know what this is about, but he’s dead. He’s been dead. He died in that cabin, actually.” He pointed a finger at my home accusingly. With those words, my heart seemed to drop into my stomach. Waves of dread flowed through my body like water.
“How… how did he die? Like a heart attack or something?” I asked. Steve’s gaze turned downwards. He didn’t meet my eyes.
“Do you know that Alaska has the highest missing persons rate in the entire United States? It’s not even close. In fact, for the population size, we have far more people who go missing and never get found than anywhere else. They even have a name for it: the Alaska Triangle,” Steve said. “And we’re square in the middle of it.” I stared blankly at him, wondering where he was going with this. It seemed like a way to avoid answering my question.
“No, I didn’t know that…” I responded. Steve nodded, raising his head again. He heaved a deep sigh.
“Look, the thing with the last owner and his wife… it’s somewhat disturbing. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you, but it’s certainly not going to help your peace of mind. And it definitely isn’t going to help you get some sleep.”
“I want to know,” I insisted instantly. The wind started to whip past us. Flakes of ice and snow flew sideways in the sudden currents.
“Let’s go back to your cabin then,” Steve said, pulling his heavy fur-lined hood off and shaking out his long, black hair behind him. “I could use a bit of whiskey to warm up.”
***
We sat down with a bottle of Johnny Walker and two shot glasses. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but Steve certainly was. He chugged three shots in the span of a minute. I sipped at mine, drinking half and putting it back down on the coffee table with a thunk. Steve grunted, hissing through his open mouth for a moment.
“Ugh, that’s the good stuff,” he said, slamming his chest as the burning liquor worked its way down. Steve looked up at me with a new sparkle in his eyes. “Huh, so you want to know about what happened to Will Lenning. Well, I’ll tell you that no one really knows the whole story. I used to see him occasionally, come down and have a drink and talk. We all know each other around here, obviously.” I nodded, motioning him on. “He seemed like a normal, upstanding guy. He kinda reminded me of you, actually. A young guy trying to escape the hustle and bustle of the city life, the cancer of the American Dream.
“Well, he was here for maybe a couple months, I don’t know. Everything seemed fine. We used to go skeet shooting occasionally, have a beer, you know. We’d get together with a couple other hunters who live closer to town and sometimes play some poker. I never saw anything odd about Will. I never could have predicted what happened to him.” He heaved a long sigh at this, looking out the window at the sharp mountains with an expression of nostalgia.
“Well, what happened to him?” I asked, encouraging him to go on.
“He started talking about seeing someone peering in through his window at night. He talked about hearing sounds from under his bed while he was laying there in the dark- sounds like diseased breathing and shuffling. He started keeping all the lights on in his cabin twenty-four hours a day.” Steve leaned close to me. A glimmer of fear rippled across his pale, wrinkled face. “He started to lose his mind. Started digging holes all over the place, looking for something. Even in the middle of snowstorms, I would occasionally see him outside, digging. It seemed like he never slept anymore. It was classic cabin fever if I ever saw it.
“It was only a few weeks later that I came over here, concerned. I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, which was fairly unusual. I found the door hanging wide open. Propped up in a chair in the exact spot where you now sit, Will lay with a blast hole showing clear through his skull, a shotgun laying at his feet.
“And next to him, I found a blood-stained diary opened to the middle page. The last entry was stained with blood spatter, but still visible. I remember leaning down and reading it. It was only a few sentences long.” I glanced over at the bookshelf with the same diary, saying nothing.
“It said something like, ‘I see now what’s going on. The Twisted Man is leading me to the truth. Today, I will finally find it.’”
“And that was his suicide note?” I asked, my heart hammering in my chest. He nodded.
“Yeah. I went into town and got some rangers to come check it out. Eventually, they got cops and CSI there. They took all the stuff as evidence, including the diary,” he said. “Good riddance, I say. Reading something like that is never beneficial. Sometimes delusions spread like a virus, you know what I mean?” I did, but I said nothing. I glanced back at the diary, its black leather cover gleaming like a crouching snake.
And I wondered- if the police took the diary as evidence, how did it get back here?
***
“You said he had a wife living here with him, too?” I asked.
“Yeah… she went missing around the same time,” he said. “Pretty bizarre. The cops thought maybe she just moved away, but…” He shook his head grimly. “As far as I know, she was never seen again. It was like she had evaporated into thin air.”
After Steve left, I walked stiffly over to the bookshelf, taking down the diary. I flipped open through the pages. In the middle, I found the last entry. Spatters of old, darkened blood were scattered over the page like raindrops. I found the suicide note and read the date.
“January 27th, 2015,” it read. Will Lenning had not lived long after he started seeing the Twisted Man. I wondered if my fate would be the same.
The Sun had started to set outside as I sat with the diary at the small circular kitchen table, eating some stewed venison and rice as I read through the entries. At the end, Will Lenning said the Twisted Man had been trying to guide him somewhere, that, in fact, the Twisted Man had been trying to protect him from some great evil, rather than being the source of it.
I scoffed, feeling a flash of anger at his stupidity. His naivety obviously led to his death. But then a flash of insight struck me like lightning.
What if I was committing the same kind of stupidity? Perhaps I should just grab my gun and valuables and leave. I could take off on the snowmobile and be in town within a couple hours.
But, in my heart, I knew I would not. Something about the mystery of all this beckoned me to stay. Like a siren leading sailors to destruction, my curiosity called out to me, and I knew I would not be leaving that night. I needed answers.
And, sadly, I would find them.
***
I had fallen asleep with an empty bottle of beer in my hand. I sat in front of the TV, which only got satellite reception. There were, of course, no cable or phone lines threading their way through the forest. All of my power came from stored solar energy. Since I rarely watched TV and really only used it to cook or heat up water for bathing, the energy produced was sufficient even in winter. Tonight, though, I needed its sound, its mindless flashing of light and colors and canned laughter. It seemed to drive away the creeping, suffocating presence like a candle.
I woke suddenly. The TV flashed with static. The repetitive hissing of the white noise spit from the speakers like thousands of snakes. I glanced up at the clock. 3:33 AM. I looked around the dark cabin, confused for a long moment. I didn’t understand what had woken me so abruptly. The satellite had never gone out before, either, even with the howling winds and freezing hail of the Alaskan winter.
The TV started flickering as if the static were rising upwards. Black lines traced their way horizontally across the screen. The hissing deepened into a gurgle, and for a second, I thought I heard faint words behind the white noise. I thought I heard breathing, slow and diseased, like the death gasp of a drowning man.
A black line rose across the TV and an image came into view. The cabin was suddenly plunged into silence, except for the shrieking, wintry wind outside. I leaned close to the screen, confused at what I was looking at. It looked like a live camera feed of a room. As I took in the details, I realized it was my cabin. I saw myself in the chair, leaning close to the screen. I raised my hand, and the miniature version of me on the screen did likewise. Ice water seemed to drip down my spine as waves of dread coursed through my body.
“What the fuck is this?” I whispered, looking back to where the camera should be. It was just a coarse wooden ceiling in that corner. I turned back to the screen and nearly screamed.
The TV showed a pale, naked man crouching directly behind my chair now. With jerky movements, he rose, his broken spine twisting and shivering. A hissing voice rang out from the speakers. It spoke as if it had dirt and writhing maggots in its throat.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death,” it gurgled. “Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
Long, broken fingers with blackened nails reached out to touch my shoulders. I jumped out of the chair, stumbling back as I spun around in terror. My back smashed into the TV, and it fell to the floor with a shattering of glass and an explosion of light.
In those few moments before the darkness descended on me like a blanket, I thought I glimpsed a pale, sunken face with rotted, blackened eyes peeking out from behind the chair.
***
I turned on every light in the cabin, but there was no sign of the Twisted Man now. I knew I had to get out of there, though. I thought about the warning that the voice had spoken. If the creature wanted to attack me, then why hadn’t it just killed me while I was sleeping? None of it made sense. Who was watching me? The Twisted Man? And if he was, why warn me? Perhaps it was psychological warfare, I thought to myself. Perhaps the Twisted Man simply liked to play with his food before he ate it.
Thoughts raced through my head at a thousand miles an hour as I threw on snow pants and a couple heavy sweaters and coats. I covered up my entire body as much as I could to try to prevent frostbite. I had made up my mind to flee. There was no snowstorm tonight, though the entire landscape was blanketed in it and I knew the wind chill would be like an ice blade whipping against my skin. It was extremely dangerous to travel in the middle of the night like this in temperatures that might reach negative thirty degrees. Steve had been right, after all- Alaska had the highest missing persons rate of any state, and many of them were never found, their bodies likely frozen solid in the deep snow dozens of miles from the nearest town.
I grabbed my shotgun, jumped on my snowmobile and started heading to Steve’s cabin. I hoped I could wait there until the sunrise and then figure out what to do next.
But fate would take the decision out of my hands.
***
I felt like there were eyes watching me as I drove along the narrow, winding deer trail. The boughs of the evergreens reached into the path like greedy hands, grabbing at my coat and legs. More than a couple times, I thought I saw a pale, naked figure standing in the snow, but it had always gone when I turned to look.
I gave a sigh of relief when Steve’s place appeared in the distance. I could see the lights twinkling through the small windows of his log cabin. I pulled up next to his door, looking down. I saw two pairs of footprints there, one much smaller than the other. I found it odd, but shrugged it off. The snowmobile cut out with a sucking gurgle.
I knocked on the door hard a few times. Steve appeared after a few moments, groggy and half-dressed. He blinked slowly as he looked me up and down. His wrinkled face fell into a frown.
“Steve, I need a favor,” I said quickly. “Something weird is happening in my cabin. Can I stay here until morning, until maybe I can go to town or something? I can’t stay at my place tonight. I just can’t.” He nodded, yawning and motioning me in.
“You can sleep on the couch, I guess,” Steve said. “Put that shotgun somewhere safe, though, boy.” He had a partitioned bedroom in his cabin. It was significantly larger than my little one-room cabin, though it was basically still just a joint kitchen-living room, a small bedroom and a bathroom. He pointed to a well-worn couch in the corner and gave me an apathetic wave as he stumbled back into his bedroom, slamming the door.
I couldn’t sleep, though. I tiptoed around the room, looking at Steve’s bookshelf. He had a rather strange taste in books- lots of Anne Rule and true crime there. I saw dozens of books about Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Chase, Herbert Mullin, Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez among the collection. At the end, a large, black binder stood, unlabeled and worn-looking. It reminded me of the look of that leather-bound diary for a second, and my heart dropped. But logically, I knew this was just a coincidence. Yet, still, I pulled out the binder, my curiosity piqued.
What I found inside filled me with dread and horror.
Countless news clippings covered the length of it. The first clipping was from nearly twenty years earlier, about a woman who went missing in the Alaskan forest while hiking. A later one confirmed that her body was never found, and that her family was still hoping that she might turn up alive somewhere. A reward was offered for any information, it said.
And every page after that was more of the same: missing woman, murdered prostitute, missing man, no leads. I kept flipping through until I found clippings about Will Lenning’s suicide and the sudden disappearance of his wife. On the article about the suicide, Steve had used red marker to scrawl, “HA HA!” next to it.
I heard the click of a gun being cocked from behind me. I froze as Steve’s voice traveled across the room like a whisper.
“How do you like my work, friend?” he asked, his tone jovial and mocking.
***
I still held the binder of horrors tightly in my hands as I stared open-mouthed at this man I thought I knew.
“It’s you? What, you killed Will Lenning and his wife? And a lot of other women, apparently.” Everything felt unreal, as if I were stuck in a dream. Steve’s grin spread across his face, but his blue eyes stayed cold and dead.
“Yes, well, she was cheating on him with me anyway. Just another whore, you know. They always get what’s coming to them in the end,” he hissed with hatred oozing from his voice. “It’s too bad, really. I just killed another slut tonight. I was planning on saving you for later. The urge isn’t too bad yet right now, after all. It comes in cycles, you see. It comes in waves…” I saw a glimmer of pale, naked flesh writhing behind Steve. With jerky movements, the Twisted Man came up behind him. I said nothing, just watching with wide-eyed horror and amazement.
“You need help, man,” I whispered. Steve laughed.
“Help? The only help they give people like me is a needle in the arm. You know that. That’s why it’s important to always cover your tracks…” The Twisted Man ran a long, broken finger across Steve’s neck. Steve gave a strangled cry and jumped. He spun around, screaming. I glanced over at my shotgun next to the couch.
I jumped for it as Steve turned back to me, firing his pistol twice. The first bullet soared high above me, raining wood splinters down on my head, but the second ripped into my leg. A cold, burning pain ran like fire up my shin. I screamed in agony and battle fury as I gripped the shotgun, spinning and firing.
Steve’s head exploded as the slug ripped through his brain. His forehead collapsed like a smashed melon as bone splinters and blood sprayed the wall behind him.
The Twisted Man stood there, hunched over, grinning up at me. I felt warm blood gushing from my leg as I stared back at him, breathing hard. I wondered if I was dying.
“You… you weren’t after me at all, were you?” I asked. “You were after… Steve.” But the Twisted Man said nothing. After a long moment, he slinked back into the shadows of the bedroom and disappeared.
***
As night crawled its way toward morning, I thought back to the words the Twisted Man had spoken through the TV, suddenly understanding everything.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death. Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
He hadn’t been trying to hurt me at all. He had been trying to warn me. He had probably tried to warn Will Lenning and his wife, too.
I wrapped my leg in gauze, gritting my teeth. The wound looked puckered and deep, but I could still move my foot, and the bullet had gone clean through the flesh. I poured alcohol on it, screaming in pain as it burned its way through my skin. After rummaging through Steve’s bathroom, I found some prescription painkillers and swallowed a handful of them with a beer. I knew I would need the opiate high to get through the pain of riding into town with a mutilated leg.
As the Sun finally rose, I made my way outside the blood-stained floors of the cabin to my snowmobile. Before I left, I glanced back at that horrid place, the scene of so much torment and death.
In the open doorway, the Twisted Man stood, his back hunched, his rotted lips grinning at me. His hand lifted up into the air with jerky movements and waved.
I waved back as I started the engine and headed into town.

A few years ago, I decided I needed a major life change. Everything seemed to be going downhill- my finances, my mental health, my life. I would go weeks without sleeping sometimes as the heavy traffic passed through the city streets down below. Every time I went outside, I saw more homeless people, more needles and crack pipes littering the ground, more muggings and assaults and overdoses and deaths. The city had become a wasteland, and I knew it was time to leave.
I had no girlfriend, no wife, no kids. My parents had both died a few years prior and I barely talked to my siblings anymore. I had nothing to tie me down to this place where I felt like I was dying inside a little more each day.
That was when I sold nearly everything I owned, got in my car and drove up to Alaska to try starting anew. I bought a small cabin and a plot of land in the middle of its majestic mountains and dark, enchanting forests. In the winter, the Northern Lights would shine through like the eyes of God, sending out divine trails of light that danced through the sky in cosmic waves.
And while the move did help give me some peace of mind, in the end, the source of all my problems had ultimately followed me thousands of miles into this endless wilderness. It would take me a long time to realize the cause of all this misery was myself.
Because, as a wise man once said, “Wherever I go, there I am.”
***
I lived in that cabin for three months without any major issues other than the constant threat of bears, moose and wolves. I had a rifle and a shotgun for hunting, a small garden in the backyard and a solar panel to generate electricity.
“This is the life,” I said, relaxing on a hammock I had strung across the corner of the cabin while staring at the endless beauty directly outside the window. White-capped mountains loomed like giants in front of thick clusters of evergreens. A virgin covering of fluffy snow made the entire world glisten and sparkle. There wasn’t a house or road in sight.
“No work, no stress, no pollution, no cars honking all the time…” I closed my eyes, breathing in the clean air. I ended up falling asleep for a couple hours, waking up just as the Sun had started setting. Bright orange streaks mixed with the bloody smears of the fading light as it disappeared behind the mountains.
I groggily arose, stumbling over to make a cup of instant coffee. As I sipped it, I wandered around the room, looking for something to pass the time. There were still quite a few random objects left behind by the last owner that I hadn’t gotten rid of yet. I had moved in to find a stocked bookshelf filled with classics by Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Bored, I started rifling through the collection, looking for something good to pass the time. As I shuffled past “A Maze of Death” and “Ubik”, something caught my eye.
A black, leather-bound book with no title or author name stood there, its cover faded with time and wear. Curious, I pulled it out and opened it. I saw the cursive scrawled across the pages in a neat, copperplate script and realized it was a diary left behind by the previous owner. The first entry was dated “January 9th, 2015.” This is what it said.
***
“I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not. I went into town to talk to my therapist yesterday and she said I should try writing everything down. She talks to me like it’s all in my head. But I know it’s not.
“When I first moved into the cabin, it seemed like Paradise. I never thought in a million years that something would be slinking around at night. I never thought it would be hiding under my bed, peeking in windows and following me like a shadow.
“Right now, I’m snowed in with a cup of coffee in one hand and my pistol in the other. I can’t sleep anymore. I keep hearing something shuffling around under the bed. Sometimes, I think I even hear ragged breathing, as if a corpse with dirt in its lungs had come back to life.
“I’ve caught glimpses of that thing in the darkness. Whatever it is, its skin is loose, almost falling off the bone. It almost looks like a naked, emaciated man. Its eyes are rotted and dark, its back hunched, its spine twisted and jutting out like tumors. It moves in this slow, jerky way, but I can never seem to catch it. Its body seems broken and out of alignment. Its legs bend the wrong way sometimes.
“By the time I turn on the lights or try to take a video of it, it’s always disappeared. But its fetid odor remains. It lingers in the cabin like a sweet-smelling, spreading infection.
“I don’t know what it wants from me. I want to leave, but with the storm raging outside, I’m stuck here, unable to get all the way back to town. The snow surrounds the cabin in mounds five feet high. I feel like a prisoner caged with a rabid beast, not knowing when it will strike.
“My wife claims she hasn’t seen or heard anything, but she keeps vanishing on me. Last night, she disappeared in the middle of a snowstorm. Where did she go? I asked her in the morning, but she said she was here the whole time. She didn’t remember anything. There’s no way she went into town. There wasn’t time and the trails were impassable that far down.
“Something’s going on here, but I don’t know what it is. I’m truly scared for our lives.”
I slammed the diary shut, not wanting to read anymore. I didn’t want to become infected by some kind of contagious cabin fever. If the last owner had gone insane in the mountains and started hallucinating naked corpses crawling around, I really didn’t want to know.
I shoved the diary back in the bookshelf, going for “A Maze of Death” instead. I tried to forget what I had read in the diary as I flew through the novella. All night, I tried to get the image of the naked, twisting man with rotted eyes out of my head, but I couldn’t.
I eventually fell asleep right before dawn. But, as my eyes were closing, I thought I saw a silhouette in the window- a starved man with excited, black eyes that seemed to be rotting out of his skull. I thought I saw him put his inhumanly long fingers against the glass as he leaned forward. I blinked, sitting up and glancing out into the white, snow-covered wonderland.
There was nothing there.
***
Another hunter occasionally followed the deer trails near my cabin. A frozen lake stood a quarter-mile away, the surface white and covered in thick drifts of snow. I bundled up, deciding to go outside for a hike in the frigid dawn. I strapped on my snowshoes and grabbed my shotgun, as I always did when I went outside. I never knew when a polar bear might be waiting around the next tree, after all.
I opened the door, seeing footprints pressed into the snow all around my house. At first, I thought it was that silhouette I had seen, the nightmarish thing from the diary. But the footprints didn’t go over to my window. They followed the trail twenty feet away, veering off towards the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill. I glanced down in that direction, seeing a black figure plodding slowly forward.
“Steve!” I cried, recognizing my only neighbor in a four-mile radius. He had a cabin about a mile away on his own little plot of land. He jumped, clearly startled by the sudden noise. His black snow pants and heavy fur coat swished together as he spun, raising his rifle high. When he saw me, he immediately lowered it and put a gloved hand up in a friendly greeting.
“Hey Josh! Surprised to see you up this early,” he yelled over the muted wintry landscape. Sounds always seemed different after it snowed, as if all the noise in the world had become faded and dead.
“Yeah, I’ve been having a little trouble sleeping,” I said, slinging my shotgun around my shoulder. “What are you doing anyway?”
“Just a little hunting, you know,” he said, giving me a sly wink. “Animals are always most active around dusk and dawn, it seems. That’s when I always have the best luck, anyway.” He stepped close to me, staring me in the eyes. “You do look like shit. Those bags under your eyes are big enough to carry groceries in.”
“Yeah, trust me, I know… Hey, this might sound a little weird, but did you know the previous owner of this cabin?” I asked. Steve’s wrinkled, old face fell into a scowl. His expression immediately became guarded and distant.
“Sure, sure, we met,” he exclaimed bluntly. He seemed to be searching my face for something, but I didn’t know what. His reaction left me feeling off-balance and nervous.
“Is he still around?” I said. Steve’s scowl deepened.
“Buddy, I don’t know what this is about, but he’s dead. He’s been dead. He died in that cabin, actually.” He pointed a finger at my home accusingly. With those words, my heart seemed to drop into my stomach. Waves of dread flowed through my body like water.
“How… how did he die? Like a heart attack or something?” I asked. Steve’s gaze turned downwards. He didn’t meet my eyes.
“Do you know that Alaska has the highest missing persons rate in the entire United States? It’s not even close. In fact, for the population size, we have far more people who go missing and never get found than anywhere else. They even have a name for it: the Alaska Triangle,” Steve said. “And we’re square in the middle of it.” I stared blankly at him, wondering where he was going with this. It seemed like a way to avoid answering my question.
“No, I didn’t know that…” I responded. Steve nodded, raising his head again. He heaved a deep sigh.
“Look, the thing with the last owner and his wife… it’s somewhat disturbing. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you, but it’s certainly not going to help your peace of mind. And it definitely isn’t going to help you get some sleep.”
“I want to know,” I insisted instantly. The wind started to whip past us. Flakes of ice and snow flew sideways in the sudden currents.
“Let’s go back to your cabin then,” Steve said, pulling his heavy fur-lined hood off and shaking out his long, black hair behind him. “I could use a bit of whiskey to warm up.”
***
We sat down with a bottle of Johnny Walker and two shot glasses. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but Steve certainly was. He chugged three shots in the span of a minute. I sipped at mine, drinking half and putting it back down on the coffee table with a thunk. Steve grunted, hissing through his open mouth for a moment.
“Ugh, that’s the good stuff,” he said, slamming his chest as the burning liquor worked its way down. Steve looked up at me with a new sparkle in his eyes. “Huh, so you want to know about what happened to Will Lenning. Well, I’ll tell you that no one really knows the whole story. I used to see him occasionally, come down and have a drink and talk. We all know each other around here, obviously.” I nodded, motioning him on. “He seemed like a normal, upstanding guy. He kinda reminded me of you, actually. A young guy trying to escape the hustle and bustle of the city life, the cancer of the American Dream.
“Well, he was here for maybe a couple months, I don’t know. Everything seemed fine. We used to go skeet shooting occasionally, have a beer, you know. We’d get together with a couple other hunters who live closer to town and sometimes play some poker. I never saw anything odd about Will. I never could have predicted what happened to him.” He heaved a long sigh at this, looking out the window at the sharp mountains with an expression of nostalgia.
“Well, what happened to him?” I asked, encouraging him to go on.
“He started talking about seeing someone peering in through his window at night. He talked about hearing sounds from under his bed while he was laying there in the dark- sounds like diseased breathing and shuffling. He started keeping all the lights on in his cabin twenty-four hours a day.” Steve leaned close to me. A glimmer of fear rippled across his pale, wrinkled face. “He started to lose his mind. Started digging holes all over the place, looking for something. Even in the middle of snowstorms, I would occasionally see him outside, digging. It seemed like he never slept anymore. It was classic cabin fever if I ever saw it.
“It was only a few weeks later that I came over here, concerned. I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, which was fairly unusual. I found the door hanging wide open. Propped up in a chair in the exact spot where you now sit, Will lay with a blast hole showing clear through his skull, a shotgun laying at his feet.
“And next to him, I found a blood-stained diary opened to the middle page. The last entry was stained with blood spatter, but still visible. I remember leaning down and reading it. It was only a few sentences long.” I glanced over at the bookshelf with the same diary, saying nothing.
“It said something like, ‘I see now what’s going on. The Twisted Man is leading me to the truth. Today, I will finally find it.’”
“And that was his suicide note?” I asked, my heart hammering in my chest. He nodded.
“Yeah. I went into town and got some rangers to come check it out. Eventually, they got cops and CSI there. They took all the stuff as evidence, including the diary,” he said. “Good riddance, I say. Reading something like that is never beneficial. Sometimes delusions spread like a virus, you know what I mean?” I did, but I said nothing. I glanced back at the diary, its black leather cover gleaming like a crouching snake.
And I wondered- if the police took the diary as evidence, how did it get back here?
***
“You said he had a wife living here with him, too?” I asked.
“Yeah… she went missing around the same time,” he said. “Pretty bizarre. The cops thought maybe she just moved away, but…” He shook his head grimly. “As far as I know, she was never seen again. It was like she had evaporated into thin air.”
After Steve left, I walked stiffly over to the bookshelf, taking down the diary. I flipped open through the pages. In the middle, I found the last entry. Spatters of old, darkened blood were scattered over the page like raindrops. I found the suicide note and read the date.
“January 27th, 2015,” it read. Will Lenning had not lived long after he started seeing the Twisted Man. I wondered if my fate would be the same.
The Sun had started to set outside as I sat with the diary at the small circular kitchen table, eating some stewed venison and rice as I read through the entries. At the end, Will Lenning said the Twisted Man had been trying to guide him somewhere, that, in fact, the Twisted Man had been trying to protect him from some great evil, rather than being the source of it.
I scoffed, feeling a flash of anger at his stupidity. His naivety obviously led to his death. But then a flash of insight struck me like lightning.
What if I was committing the same kind of stupidity? Perhaps I should just grab my gun and valuables and leave. I could take off on the snowmobile and be in town within a couple hours.
But, in my heart, I knew I would not. Something about the mystery of all this beckoned me to stay. Like a siren leading sailors to destruction, my curiosity called out to me, and I knew I would not be leaving that night. I needed answers.
And, sadly, I would find them.
***
I had fallen asleep with an empty bottle of beer in my hand. I sat in front of the TV, which only got satellite reception. There were, of course, no cable or phone lines threading their way through the forest. All of my power came from stored solar energy. Since I rarely watched TV and really only used it to cook or heat up water for bathing, the energy produced was sufficient even in winter. Tonight, though, I needed its sound, its mindless flashing of light and colors and canned laughter. It seemed to drive away the creeping, suffocating presence like a candle.
I woke suddenly. The TV flashed with static. The repetitive hissing of the white noise spit from the speakers like thousands of snakes. I glanced up at the clock. 3:33 AM. I looked around the dark cabin, confused for a long moment. I didn’t understand what had woken me so abruptly. The satellite had never gone out before, either, even with the howling winds and freezing hail of the Alaskan winter.
The TV started flickering as if the static were rising upwards. Black lines traced their way horizontally across the screen. The hissing deepened into a gurgle, and for a second, I thought I heard faint words behind the white noise. I thought I heard breathing, slow and diseased, like the death gasp of a drowning man.
A black line rose across the TV and an image came into view. The cabin was suddenly plunged into silence, except for the shrieking, wintry wind outside. I leaned close to the screen, confused at what I was looking at. It looked like a live camera feed of a room. As I took in the details, I realized it was my cabin. I saw myself in the chair, leaning close to the screen. I raised my hand, and the miniature version of me on the screen did likewise. Ice water seemed to drip down my spine as waves of dread coursed through my body.
“What the fuck is this?” I whispered, looking back to where the camera should be. It was just a coarse wooden ceiling in that corner. I turned back to the screen and nearly screamed.
The TV showed a pale, naked man crouching directly behind my chair now. With jerky movements, he rose, his broken spine twisting and shivering. A hissing voice rang out from the speakers. It spoke as if it had dirt and writhing maggots in its throat.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death,” it gurgled. “Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
Long, broken fingers with blackened nails reached out to touch my shoulders. I jumped out of the chair, stumbling back as I spun around in terror. My back smashed into the TV, and it fell to the floor with a shattering of glass and an explosion of light.
In those few moments before the darkness descended on me like a blanket, I thought I glimpsed a pale, sunken face with rotted, blackened eyes peeking out from behind the chair.
***
I turned on every light in the cabin, but there was no sign of the Twisted Man now. I knew I had to get out of there, though. I thought about the warning that the voice had spoken. If the creature wanted to attack me, then why hadn’t it just killed me while I was sleeping? None of it made sense. Who was watching me? The Twisted Man? And if he was, why warn me? Perhaps it was psychological warfare, I thought to myself. Perhaps the Twisted Man simply liked to play with his food before he ate it.
Thoughts raced through my head at a thousand miles an hour as I threw on snow pants and a couple heavy sweaters and coats. I covered up my entire body as much as I could to try to prevent frostbite. I had made up my mind to flee. There was no snowstorm tonight, though the entire landscape was blanketed in it and I knew the wind chill would be like an ice blade whipping against my skin. It was extremely dangerous to travel in the middle of the night like this in temperatures that might reach negative thirty degrees. Steve had been right, after all- Alaska had the highest missing persons rate of any state, and many of them were never found, their bodies likely frozen solid in the deep snow dozens of miles from the nearest town.
I grabbed my shotgun, jumped on my snowmobile and started heading to Steve’s cabin. I hoped I could wait there until the sunrise and then figure out what to do next.
But fate would take the decision out of my hands.
***
I felt like there were eyes watching me as I drove along the narrow, winding deer trail. The boughs of the evergreens reached into the path like greedy hands, grabbing at my coat and legs. More than a couple times, I thought I saw a pale, naked figure standing in the snow, but it had always gone when I turned to look.
I gave a sigh of relief when Steve’s place appeared in the distance. I could see the lights twinkling through the small windows of his log cabin. I pulled up next to his door, looking down. I saw two pairs of footprints there, one much smaller than the other. I found it odd, but shrugged it off. The snowmobile cut out with a sucking gurgle.
I knocked on the door hard a few times. Steve appeared after a few moments, groggy and half-dressed. He blinked slowly as he looked me up and down. His wrinkled face fell into a frown.
“Steve, I need a favor,” I said quickly. “Something weird is happening in my cabin. Can I stay here until morning, until maybe I can go to town or something? I can’t stay at my place tonight. I just can’t.” He nodded, yawning and motioning me in.
“You can sleep on the couch, I guess,” Steve said. “Put that shotgun somewhere safe, though, boy.” He had a partitioned bedroom in his cabin. It was significantly larger than my little one-room cabin, though it was basically still just a joint kitchen-living room, a small bedroom and a bathroom. He pointed to a well-worn couch in the corner and gave me an apathetic wave as he stumbled back into his bedroom, slamming the door.
I couldn’t sleep, though. I tiptoed around the room, looking at Steve’s bookshelf. He had a rather strange taste in books- lots of Anne Rule and true crime there. I saw dozens of books about Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Chase, Herbert Mullin, Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez among the collection. At the end, a large, black binder stood, unlabeled and worn-looking. It reminded me of the look of that leather-bound diary for a second, and my heart dropped. But logically, I knew this was just a coincidence. Yet, still, I pulled out the binder, my curiosity piqued.
What I found inside filled me with dread and horror.
Countless news clippings covered the length of it. The first clipping was from nearly twenty years earlier, about a woman who went missing in the Alaskan forest while hiking. A later one confirmed that her body was never found, and that her family was still hoping that she might turn up alive somewhere. A reward was offered for any information, it said.
And every page after that was more of the same: missing woman, murdered prostitute, missing man, no leads. I kept flipping through until I found clippings about Will Lenning’s suicide and the sudden disappearance of his wife. On the article about the suicide, Steve had used red marker to scrawl, “HA HA!” next to it.
I heard the click of a gun being cocked from behind me. I froze as Steve’s voice traveled across the room like a whisper.
“How do you like my work, friend?” he asked, his tone jovial and mocking.
***
I still held the binder of horrors tightly in my hands as I stared open-mouthed at this man I thought I knew.
“It’s you? What, you killed Will Lenning and his wife? And a lot of other women, apparently.” Everything felt unreal, as if I were stuck in a dream. Steve’s grin spread across his face, but his blue eyes stayed cold and dead.
“Yes, well, she was cheating on him with me anyway. Just another whore, you know. They always get what’s coming to them in the end,” he hissed with hatred oozing from his voice. “It’s too bad, really. I just killed another slut tonight. I was planning on saving you for later. The urge isn’t too bad yet right now, after all. It comes in cycles, you see. It comes in waves…” I saw a glimmer of pale, naked flesh writhing behind Steve. With jerky movements, the Twisted Man came up behind him. I said nothing, just watching with wide-eyed horror and amazement.
“You need help, man,” I whispered. Steve laughed.
“Help? The only help they give people like me is a needle in the arm. You know that. That’s why it’s important to always cover your tracks…” The Twisted Man ran a long, broken finger across Steve’s neck. Steve gave a strangled cry and jumped. He spun around, screaming. I glanced over at my shotgun next to the couch.
I jumped for it as Steve turned back to me, firing his pistol twice. The first bullet soared high above me, raining wood splinters down on my head, but the second ripped into my leg. A cold, burning pain ran like fire up my shin. I screamed in agony and battle fury as I gripped the shotgun, spinning and firing.
Steve’s head exploded as the slug ripped through his brain. His forehead collapsed like a smashed melon as bone splinters and blood sprayed the wall behind him.
The Twisted Man stood there, hunched over, grinning up at me. I felt warm blood gushing from my leg as I stared back at him, breathing hard. I wondered if I was dying.
“You… you weren’t after me at all, were you?” I asked. “You were after… Steve.” But the Twisted Man said nothing. After a long moment, he slinked back into the shadows of the bedroom and disappeared.
***
As night crawled its way toward morning, I thought back to the words the Twisted Man had spoken through the TV, suddenly understanding everything.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death. Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
He hadn’t been trying to hurt me at all. He had been trying to warn me. He had probably tried to warn Will Lenning and his wife, too.
I wrapped my leg in gauze, gritting my teeth. The wound looked puckered and deep, but I could still move my foot, and the bullet had gone clean through the flesh. I poured alcohol on it, screaming in pain as it burned its way through my skin. After rummaging through Steve’s bathroom, I found some prescription painkillers and swallowed a handful of them with a beer. I knew I would need the opiate high to get through the pain of riding into town with a mutilated leg.
As the Sun finally rose, I made my way outside the blood-stained floors of the cabin to my snowmobile. Before I left, I glanced back at that horrid place, the scene of so much torment and death.
In the open doorway, the Twisted Man stood, his back hunched, his rotted lips grinning at me. His hand lifted up into the air with jerky movements and waved.
I waved back as I started the engine and headed into town.

A few years ago, I decided I needed a major life change. Everything seemed to be going downhill- my finances, my mental health, my life. I would go weeks without sleeping sometimes as the heavy traffic passed through the city streets down below. Every time I went outside, I saw more homeless people, more needles and crack pipes littering the ground, more muggings and assaults and overdoses and deaths. The city had become a wasteland, and I knew it was time to leave.
I had no girlfriend, no wife, no kids. My parents had both died a few years prior and I barely talked to my siblings anymore. I had nothing to tie me down to this place where I felt like I was dying inside a little more each day.
That was when I sold nearly everything I owned, got in my car and drove up to Alaska to try starting anew. I bought a small cabin and a plot of land in the middle of its majestic mountains and dark, enchanting forests. In the winter, the Northern Lights would shine through like the eyes of God, sending out divine trails of light that danced through the sky in cosmic waves.
And while the move did help give me some peace of mind, in the end, the source of all my problems had ultimately followed me thousands of miles into this endless wilderness. It would take me a long time to realize the cause of all this misery was myself.
Because, as a wise man once said, “Wherever I go, there I am.”
***
I lived in that cabin for three months without any major issues other than the constant threat of bears, moose and wolves. I had a rifle and a shotgun for hunting, a small garden in the backyard and a solar panel to generate electricity.
“This is the life,” I said, relaxing on a hammock I had strung across the corner of the cabin while staring at the endless beauty directly outside the window. White-capped mountains loomed like giants in front of thick clusters of evergreens. A virgin covering of fluffy snow made the entire world glisten and sparkle. There wasn’t a house or road in sight.
“No work, no stress, no pollution, no cars honking all the time…” I closed my eyes, breathing in the clean air. I ended up falling asleep for a couple hours, waking up just as the Sun had started setting. Bright orange streaks mixed with the bloody smears of the fading light as it disappeared behind the mountains.
I groggily arose, stumbling over to make a cup of instant coffee. As I sipped it, I wandered around the room, looking for something to pass the time. There were still quite a few random objects left behind by the last owner that I hadn’t gotten rid of yet. I had moved in to find a stocked bookshelf filled with classics by Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Bored, I started rifling through the collection, looking for something good to pass the time. As I shuffled past “A Maze of Death” and “Ubik”, something caught my eye.
A black, leather-bound book with no title or author name stood there, its cover faded with time and wear. Curious, I pulled it out and opened it. I saw the cursive scrawled across the pages in a neat, copperplate script and realized it was a diary left behind by the previous owner. The first entry was dated “January 9th, 2015.” This is what it said.
***
“I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not. I went into town to talk to my therapist yesterday and she said I should try writing everything down. She talks to me like it’s all in my head. But I know it’s not.
“When I first moved into the cabin, it seemed like Paradise. I never thought in a million years that something would be slinking around at night. I never thought it would be hiding under my bed, peeking in windows and following me like a shadow.
“Right now, I’m snowed in with a cup of coffee in one hand and my pistol in the other. I can’t sleep anymore. I keep hearing something shuffling around under the bed. Sometimes, I think I even hear ragged breathing, as if a corpse with dirt in its lungs had come back to life.
“I’ve caught glimpses of that thing in the darkness. Whatever it is, its skin is loose, almost falling off the bone. It almost looks like a naked, emaciated man. Its eyes are rotted and dark, its back hunched, its spine twisted and jutting out like tumors. It moves in this slow, jerky way, but I can never seem to catch it. Its body seems broken and out of alignment. Its legs bend the wrong way sometimes.
“By the time I turn on the lights or try to take a video of it, it’s always disappeared. But its fetid odor remains. It lingers in the cabin like a sweet-smelling, spreading infection.
“I don’t know what it wants from me. I want to leave, but with the storm raging outside, I’m stuck here, unable to get all the way back to town. The snow surrounds the cabin in mounds five feet high. I feel like a prisoner caged with a rabid beast, not knowing when it will strike.
“My wife claims she hasn’t seen or heard anything, but she keeps vanishing on me. Last night, she disappeared in the middle of a snowstorm. Where did she go? I asked her in the morning, but she said she was here the whole time. She didn’t remember anything. There’s no way she went into town. There wasn’t time and the trails were impassable that far down.
“Something’s going on here, but I don’t know what it is. I’m truly scared for our lives.”
I slammed the diary shut, not wanting to read anymore. I didn’t want to become infected by some kind of contagious cabin fever. If the last owner had gone insane in the mountains and started hallucinating naked corpses crawling around, I really didn’t want to know.
I shoved the diary back in the bookshelf, going for “A Maze of Death” instead. I tried to forget what I had read in the diary as I flew through the novella. All night, I tried to get the image of the naked, twisting man with rotted eyes out of my head, but I couldn’t.
I eventually fell asleep right before dawn. But, as my eyes were closing, I thought I saw a silhouette in the window- a starved man with excited, black eyes that seemed to be rotting out of his skull. I thought I saw him put his inhumanly long fingers against the glass as he leaned forward. I blinked, sitting up and glancing out into the white, snow-covered wonderland.
There was nothing there.
***
Another hunter occasionally followed the deer trails near my cabin. A frozen lake stood a quarter-mile away, the surface white and covered in thick drifts of snow. I bundled up, deciding to go outside for a hike in the frigid dawn. I strapped on my snowshoes and grabbed my shotgun, as I always did when I went outside. I never knew when a polar bear might be waiting around the next tree, after all.
I opened the door, seeing footprints pressed into the snow all around my house. At first, I thought it was that silhouette I had seen, the nightmarish thing from the diary. But the footprints didn’t go over to my window. They followed the trail twenty feet away, veering off towards the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill. I glanced down in that direction, seeing a black figure plodding slowly forward.
“Steve!” I cried, recognizing my only neighbor in a four-mile radius. He had a cabin about a mile away on his own little plot of land. He jumped, clearly startled by the sudden noise. His black snow pants and heavy fur coat swished together as he spun, raising his rifle high. When he saw me, he immediately lowered it and put a gloved hand up in a friendly greeting.
“Hey Josh! Surprised to see you up this early,” he yelled over the muted wintry landscape. Sounds always seemed different after it snowed, as if all the noise in the world had become faded and dead.
“Yeah, I’ve been having a little trouble sleeping,” I said, slinging my shotgun around my shoulder. “What are you doing anyway?”
“Just a little hunting, you know,” he said, giving me a sly wink. “Animals are always most active around dusk and dawn, it seems. That’s when I always have the best luck, anyway.” He stepped close to me, staring me in the eyes. “You do look like shit. Those bags under your eyes are big enough to carry groceries in.”
“Yeah, trust me, I know… Hey, this might sound a little weird, but did you know the previous owner of this cabin?” I asked. Steve’s wrinkled, old face fell into a scowl. His expression immediately became guarded and distant.
“Sure, sure, we met,” he exclaimed bluntly. He seemed to be searching my face for something, but I didn’t know what. His reaction left me feeling off-balance and nervous.
“Is he still around?” I said. Steve’s scowl deepened.
“Buddy, I don’t know what this is about, but he’s dead. He’s been dead. He died in that cabin, actually.” He pointed a finger at my home accusingly. With those words, my heart seemed to drop into my stomach. Waves of dread flowed through my body like water.
“How… how did he die? Like a heart attack or something?” I asked. Steve’s gaze turned downwards. He didn’t meet my eyes.
“Do you know that Alaska has the highest missing persons rate in the entire United States? It’s not even close. In fact, for the population size, we have far more people who go missing and never get found than anywhere else. They even have a name for it: the Alaska Triangle,” Steve said. “And we’re square in the middle of it.” I stared blankly at him, wondering where he was going with this. It seemed like a way to avoid answering my question.
“No, I didn’t know that…” I responded. Steve nodded, raising his head again. He heaved a deep sigh.
“Look, the thing with the last owner and his wife… it’s somewhat disturbing. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you, but it’s certainly not going to help your peace of mind. And it definitely isn’t going to help you get some sleep.”
“I want to know,” I insisted instantly. The wind started to whip past us. Flakes of ice and snow flew sideways in the sudden currents.
“Let’s go back to your cabin then,” Steve said, pulling his heavy fur-lined hood off and shaking out his long, black hair behind him. “I could use a bit of whiskey to warm up.”
***
We sat down with a bottle of Johnny Walker and two shot glasses. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but Steve certainly was. He chugged three shots in the span of a minute. I sipped at mine, drinking half and putting it back down on the coffee table with a thunk. Steve grunted, hissing through his open mouth for a moment.
“Ugh, that’s the good stuff,” he said, slamming his chest as the burning liquor worked its way down. Steve looked up at me with a new sparkle in his eyes. “Huh, so you want to know about what happened to Will Lenning. Well, I’ll tell you that no one really knows the whole story. I used to see him occasionally, come down and have a drink and talk. We all know each other around here, obviously.” I nodded, motioning him on. “He seemed like a normal, upstanding guy. He kinda reminded me of you, actually. A young guy trying to escape the hustle and bustle of the city life, the cancer of the American Dream.
“Well, he was here for maybe a couple months, I don’t know. Everything seemed fine. We used to go skeet shooting occasionally, have a beer, you know. We’d get together with a couple other hunters who live closer to town and sometimes play some poker. I never saw anything odd about Will. I never could have predicted what happened to him.” He heaved a long sigh at this, looking out the window at the sharp mountains with an expression of nostalgia.
“Well, what happened to him?” I asked, encouraging him to go on.
“He started talking about seeing someone peering in through his window at night. He talked about hearing sounds from under his bed while he was laying there in the dark- sounds like diseased breathing and shuffling. He started keeping all the lights on in his cabin twenty-four hours a day.” Steve leaned close to me. A glimmer of fear rippled across his pale, wrinkled face. “He started to lose his mind. Started digging holes all over the place, looking for something. Even in the middle of snowstorms, I would occasionally see him outside, digging. It seemed like he never slept anymore. It was classic cabin fever if I ever saw it.
“It was only a few weeks later that I came over here, concerned. I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, which was fairly unusual. I found the door hanging wide open. Propped up in a chair in the exact spot where you now sit, Will lay with a blast hole showing clear through his skull, a shotgun laying at his feet.
“And next to him, I found a blood-stained diary opened to the middle page. The last entry was stained with blood spatter, but still visible. I remember leaning down and reading it. It was only a few sentences long.” I glanced over at the bookshelf with the same diary, saying nothing.
“It said something like, ‘I see now what’s going on. The Twisted Man is leading me to the truth. Today, I will finally find it.’”
“And that was his suicide note?” I asked, my heart hammering in my chest. He nodded.
“Yeah. I went into town and got some rangers to come check it out. Eventually, they got cops and CSI there. They took all the stuff as evidence, including the diary,” he said. “Good riddance, I say. Reading something like that is never beneficial. Sometimes delusions spread like a virus, you know what I mean?” I did, but I said nothing. I glanced back at the diary, its black leather cover gleaming like a crouching snake.
And I wondered- if the police took the diary as evidence, how did it get back here?
***
“You said he had a wife living here with him, too?” I asked.
“Yeah… she went missing around the same time,” he said. “Pretty bizarre. The cops thought maybe she just moved away, but…” He shook his head grimly. “As far as I know, she was never seen again. It was like she had evaporated into thin air.”
After Steve left, I walked stiffly over to the bookshelf, taking down the diary. I flipped open through the pages. In the middle, I found the last entry. Spatters of old, darkened blood were scattered over the page like raindrops. I found the suicide note and read the date.
“January 27th, 2015,” it read. Will Lenning had not lived long after he started seeing the Twisted Man. I wondered if my fate would be the same.
The Sun had started to set outside as I sat with the diary at the small circular kitchen table, eating some stewed venison and rice as I read through the entries. At the end, Will Lenning said the Twisted Man had been trying to guide him somewhere, that, in fact, the Twisted Man had been trying to protect him from some great evil, rather than being the source of it.
I scoffed, feeling a flash of anger at his stupidity. His naivety obviously led to his death. But then a flash of insight struck me like lightning.
What if I was committing the same kind of stupidity? Perhaps I should just grab my gun and valuables and leave. I could take off on the snowmobile and be in town within a couple hours.
But, in my heart, I knew I would not. Something about the mystery of all this beckoned me to stay. Like a siren leading sailors to destruction, my curiosity called out to me, and I knew I would not be leaving that night. I needed answers.
And, sadly, I would find them.
***
I had fallen asleep with an empty bottle of beer in my hand. I sat in front of the TV, which only got satellite reception. There were, of course, no cable or phone lines threading their way through the forest. All of my power came from stored solar energy. Since I rarely watched TV and really only used it to cook or heat up water for bathing, the energy produced was sufficient even in winter. Tonight, though, I needed its sound, its mindless flashing of light and colors and canned laughter. It seemed to drive away the creeping, suffocating presence like a candle.
I woke suddenly. The TV flashed with static. The repetitive hissing of the white noise spit from the speakers like thousands of snakes. I glanced up at the clock. 3:33 AM. I looked around the dark cabin, confused for a long moment. I didn’t understand what had woken me so abruptly. The satellite had never gone out before, either, even with the howling winds and freezing hail of the Alaskan winter.
The TV started flickering as if the static were rising upwards. Black lines traced their way horizontally across the screen. The hissing deepened into a gurgle, and for a second, I thought I heard faint words behind the white noise. I thought I heard breathing, slow and diseased, like the death gasp of a drowning man.
A black line rose across the TV and an image came into view. The cabin was suddenly plunged into silence, except for the shrieking, wintry wind outside. I leaned close to the screen, confused at what I was looking at. It looked like a live camera feed of a room. As I took in the details, I realized it was my cabin. I saw myself in the chair, leaning close to the screen. I raised my hand, and the miniature version of me on the screen did likewise. Ice water seemed to drip down my spine as waves of dread coursed through my body.
“What the fuck is this?” I whispered, looking back to where the camera should be. It was just a coarse wooden ceiling in that corner. I turned back to the screen and nearly screamed.
The TV showed a pale, naked man crouching directly behind my chair now. With jerky movements, he rose, his broken spine twisting and shivering. A hissing voice rang out from the speakers. It spoke as if it had dirt and writhing maggots in its throat.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death,” it gurgled. “Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
Long, broken fingers with blackened nails reached out to touch my shoulders. I jumped out of the chair, stumbling back as I spun around in terror. My back smashed into the TV, and it fell to the floor with a shattering of glass and an explosion of light.
In those few moments before the darkness descended on me like a blanket, I thought I glimpsed a pale, sunken face with rotted, blackened eyes peeking out from behind the chair.
***
I turned on every light in the cabin, but there was no sign of the Twisted Man now. I knew I had to get out of there, though. I thought about the warning that the voice had spoken. If the creature wanted to attack me, then why hadn’t it just killed me while I was sleeping? None of it made sense. Who was watching me? The Twisted Man? And if he was, why warn me? Perhaps it was psychological warfare, I thought to myself. Perhaps the Twisted Man simply liked to play with his food before he ate it.
Thoughts raced through my head at a thousand miles an hour as I threw on snow pants and a couple heavy sweaters and coats. I covered up my entire body as much as I could to try to prevent frostbite. I had made up my mind to flee. There was no snowstorm tonight, though the entire landscape was blanketed in it and I knew the wind chill would be like an ice blade whipping against my skin. It was extremely dangerous to travel in the middle of the night like this in temperatures that might reach negative thirty degrees. Steve had been right, after all- Alaska had the highest missing persons rate of any state, and many of them were never found, their bodies likely frozen solid in the deep snow dozens of miles from the nearest town.
I grabbed my shotgun, jumped on my snowmobile and started heading to Steve’s cabin. I hoped I could wait there until the sunrise and then figure out what to do next.
But fate would take the decision out of my hands.
***
I felt like there were eyes watching me as I drove along the narrow, winding deer trail. The boughs of the evergreens reached into the path like greedy hands, grabbing at my coat and legs. More than a couple times, I thought I saw a pale, naked figure standing in the snow, but it had always gone when I turned to look.
I gave a sigh of relief when Steve’s place appeared in the distance. I could see the lights twinkling through the small windows of his log cabin. I pulled up next to his door, looking down. I saw two pairs of footprints there, one much smaller than the other. I found it odd, but shrugged it off. The snowmobile cut out with a sucking gurgle.
I knocked on the door hard a few times. Steve appeared after a few moments, groggy and half-dressed. He blinked slowly as he looked me up and down. His wrinkled face fell into a frown.
“Steve, I need a favor,” I said quickly. “Something weird is happening in my cabin. Can I stay here until morning, until maybe I can go to town or something? I can’t stay at my place tonight. I just can’t.” He nodded, yawning and motioning me in.
“You can sleep on the couch, I guess,” Steve said. “Put that shotgun somewhere safe, though, boy.” He had a partitioned bedroom in his cabin. It was significantly larger than my little one-room cabin, though it was basically still just a joint kitchen-living room, a small bedroom and a bathroom. He pointed to a well-worn couch in the corner and gave me an apathetic wave as he stumbled back into his bedroom, slamming the door.
I couldn’t sleep, though. I tiptoed around the room, looking at Steve’s bookshelf. He had a rather strange taste in books- lots of Anne Rule and true crime there. I saw dozens of books about Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Chase, Herbert Mullin, Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez among the collection. At the end, a large, black binder stood, unlabeled and worn-looking. It reminded me of the look of that leather-bound diary for a second, and my heart dropped. But logically, I knew this was just a coincidence. Yet, still, I pulled out the binder, my curiosity piqued.
What I found inside filled me with dread and horror.
Countless news clippings covered the length of it. The first clipping was from nearly twenty years earlier, about a woman who went missing in the Alaskan forest while hiking. A later one confirmed that her body was never found, and that her family was still hoping that she might turn up alive somewhere. A reward was offered for any information, it said.
And every page after that was more of the same: missing woman, murdered prostitute, missing man, no leads. I kept flipping through until I found clippings about Will Lenning’s suicide and the sudden disappearance of his wife. On the article about the suicide, Steve had used red marker to scrawl, “HA HA!” next to it.
I heard the click of a gun being cocked from behind me. I froze as Steve’s voice traveled across the room like a whisper.
“How do you like my work, friend?” he asked, his tone jovial and mocking.
***
I still held the binder of horrors tightly in my hands as I stared open-mouthed at this man I thought I knew.
“It’s you? What, you killed Will Lenning and his wife? And a lot of other women, apparently.” Everything felt unreal, as if I were stuck in a dream. Steve’s grin spread across his face, but his blue eyes stayed cold and dead.
“Yes, well, she was cheating on him with me anyway. Just another whore, you know. They always get what’s coming to them in the end,” he hissed with hatred oozing from his voice. “It’s too bad, really. I just killed another slut tonight. I was planning on saving you for later. The urge isn’t too bad yet right now, after all. It comes in cycles, you see. It comes in waves…” I saw a glimmer of pale, naked flesh writhing behind Steve. With jerky movements, the Twisted Man came up behind him. I said nothing, just watching with wide-eyed horror and amazement.
“You need help, man,” I whispered. Steve laughed.
“Help? The only help they give people like me is a needle in the arm. You know that. That’s why it’s important to always cover your tracks…” The Twisted Man ran a long, broken finger across Steve’s neck. Steve gave a strangled cry and jumped. He spun around, screaming. I glanced over at my shotgun next to the couch.
I jumped for it as Steve turned back to me, firing his pistol twice. The first bullet soared high above me, raining wood splinters down on my head, but the second ripped into my leg. A cold, burning pain ran like fire up my shin. I screamed in agony and battle fury as I gripped the shotgun, spinning and firing.
Steve’s head exploded as the slug ripped through his brain. His forehead collapsed like a smashed melon as bone splinters and blood sprayed the wall behind him.
The Twisted Man stood there, hunched over, grinning up at me. I felt warm blood gushing from my leg as I stared back at him, breathing hard. I wondered if I was dying.
“You… you weren’t after me at all, were you?” I asked. “You were after… Steve.” But the Twisted Man said nothing. After a long moment, he slinked back into the shadows of the bedroom and disappeared.
***
As night crawled its way toward morning, I thought back to the words the Twisted Man had spoken through the TV, suddenly understanding everything.
“He is a killer. The shadow of death. Many have fallen. Many lie buried across this forest. You will be next. He is watching you…”
He hadn’t been trying to hurt me at all. He had been trying to warn me. He had probably tried to warn Will Lenning and his wife, too.
I wrapped my leg in gauze, gritting my teeth. The wound looked puckered and deep, but I could still move my foot, and the bullet had gone clean through the flesh. I poured alcohol on it, screaming in pain as it burned its way through my skin. After rummaging through Steve’s bathroom, I found some prescription painkillers and swallowed a handful of them with a beer. I knew I would need the opiate high to get through the pain of riding into town with a mutilated leg.
As the Sun finally rose, I made my way outside the blood-stained floors of the cabin to my snowmobile. Before I left, I glanced back at that horrid place, the scene of so much torment and death.
In the open doorway, the Twisted Man stood, his back hunched, his rotted lips grinning at me. His hand lifted up into the air with jerky movements and waved.
I waved back as I started the engine and headed into town.

Britt Reid Jr., The New Green Hornet:

“Alright-- now you got me really mad! Mad as a goddamn hornet!”⁶
Britt Reid Jr. was once nothing more than the prodigal son of Century City's wealthiest newspaper mogul. He was perfectly content to live out his days coasting off his father's wealth, until Britt Sr. was assassinated by a man wearing a dark copy of the Green Hornet's costume. Britt swore revenge against the Hornet, scouring the city to track down his true identity, only to find that the Hornet had been his father all along right under his nose. Britt took on the mantle of his father to seek revenge on the imposter who had killed him, and to carry on his legacy policing the city’s criminal element.
This RT will inevitably contain spoilers for Dynamite Comics' Green Hornet run, which I highly recommend you check out for yourself. Feats are sourced by issue number, placed as an exponent after each link like so:
[Feat]^#
Source Key:

• Unlabelled = Green Hornet (2010)
  
• G = Green Hornet Generations (2018)
  
• BT = Green Hornet: Blood Ties (2010)
  
• ONB = Green Hornet: One Night in Bangkok
  
• K = Kato (2010)
  
• SoS = Swords of Sorrow (2015)
  
• M&K = Swords of Sorrow: Masquerade & Kato (2015)
  
• MI = Masks Vol 1 (2012)
  
• MII = Masks Vol 2 (2015)
  

Some feats will rely on scaling against other characters. The following are links to other RTs of Green Hornet characters:

• Redhand
  
• Black Hornet
  
• Hayashi Kato
  
• Mulan Kato
  

As a final note, for simplicity's sake, I will be referring to Hayashi Kato as "Kato" and Mulan Kato as "Mulan".

Strength:

Striking:

• Knocks out multiple teeth with one punch^24.
  
• Breaks a man's nose with a palm strike.³⁶
  
• Ditto.^Annual2
  
• Sends a man flying off a bridge with an uppercut¹¹
  
• Knocks away two ninjas by swinging a boom mic.^G5
  
• Busts open a reanimated corpse’s head with a brick.³⁶
  
• Shatters a plaster skull mask with a punch.¹⁴
  
• Smashes a microfiche machine.^Annual1
  
• Smashes a jukebox with a barstool.³
  
• Kicks a man through a window.^Annual1
  
• His blows shatter the visors of SWAT riot helmets.³⁹
  
• Kicks a Green Hornet imposter hard enough that he goes flying back into a table, destroying it.²⁵
  
• Shoulder bashes a door off its hinges.^Annual2
  
• Kicks down a locked door.^K11
  
• Shatters a door with a kick.¹⁵
  
• Breaks a nail board in two with his forearm^25.
  
• Wrenches a scythe out of Santa Muerte’s hands and breaks it in half with his forearm^14. Santa Muerte’s scythes are tough enough Mulan can’t pierce all the way through with her sword.¹³
  
• Knocks out an imposter Green Hornet with a length of pipe.²⁷ The imposter was previously able to walk off a bullet wound followed by a long fall through a skylight²⁵ and a double load blast to the back²⁶ from a riot shotgun firing less lethal rounds.²⁷
  
• Smashes a man through a church pew.¹⁴
  
• Breaks a reanimated corpse’s femur with a kick, making it jut out through the skin.³⁶
  
• Shatters a cyborg’s leg.²³
  
• Sends a man flying a considerable distance with a kick, colliding with a large plaster statue hard enough to topple it.¹⁴
  
• Smashes through a skylight. Before vs After.⁴
  
• When Black Hornet tries to grapple him from behind, slams his back against a concrete pillar hard enough to crack it.⁸
  

Blocking:

• Blocks a motorcycle helmet swung as a weapon against his bare arm.^Annual2
  
• Catches a swung pipe and struggles evenly with its wielder^27, eventually overpowering him^27. The man in question is capable of killing people with his bare hands^23.
  

Throwing:

• Judo throws Kato over his shoulder while sparring⁶
  
• Hurls a gangster off a bridge⁷
  
• Throws a man through a window.¹⁵
  
• Throws a metal table into a group of men.¹⁴
  

Lifting/Pulling:

• Holds his weight up above the floor of a warehouse by pushing his legs against a support strut and the wall.⁶
  
• Manhandles a purse snatcher one-handed, then lifts him off the ground by the scruff of the neck⁶
  
• Holds himself and the Black Hornet up by his fingertips, then by only one hand so he can kill Juuma in the most humiliating way possible.¹⁰
  
• Holds up Mulan on his back, then works with her to snap out of a pair of handcuffs^G5
  
• Moves the stone base of a statue reveal a secret passageway¹⁴
  
• Wrenches a zombie’s shoulder out of its socket.³⁶
  
• Breaks out of Nikki Stripez’s ribbons.³⁵ These ribbons are stated to be “cyber-bionic filaments” which Nikki claims can easily tear people limb from limb³⁴ and we later see them squeeze a man’s head off.³⁸
  
• Breaks out of a four man dogpile¹⁴
  

Grip:

• Cracks a coffee mug with his grip^24.
  
• Breaks a man’s hand in his grip.^Annual2
  

Agility:

Combat Speed:

• Shoots a human trafficker in the hand before he can pick up his gun.¹⁵
  
• Disables a detonator with a thrown hornet dart before the person holding it can press it.³⁵
  
• Rapidly headshots a whole crowd of zombies.³⁷
  

Reactions:

• Hops over a barrel rolled at him.¹¹
  
• Dives out of the way of a falling tank before it crushes him.²⁰
  
• Rolls out of the way of a swing from Scythecotic.³⁵
  
• Sidesteps a knife thrust and counterattacks.^ONB
  
• Hops a tall chainlink fence and sprints across a fairground, avoiding gunfire all the while.¹⁶
  
• Avoids gunfire from a neighbourhood militia.²⁶
  
• Outpaces the Black Hornet’s aim with his pistols.⁸
  
• Ducks a gunshot.¹¹
  
• Leans out of the way of a point blank gunshot.^Annual2
  
• Avoids multiple sources of automatic fire. The “Hurkk!” makes it seem like he’s been hit, but later in the day, he shows he’s completely unharmed.²²
  
• Evades more automatic fire.²²
  
• Evades heavy fire from a tank’s machine gun as well as a shell from its main cannon.²⁰
  
• Dodges a surprise attack from Santa Muerte^14, who was previously quick enough to tag Mulan and deflect hornet darts with her scythe¹³
  
• Catches a punch from Kato while sparring¹⁶
  
• Blocks and dodges strikes from Mulan without breaking a sweat.¹³
  
• Evades fire from a high-tech experimental aircraft while piloting the Stinger.¹⁰
  

Movement:

• Vanishes from sight when a detective looks briefly away^12.
  
• Makes it up to the roof of a building in time to intercept a man who grappled there.²⁷
  
• Leaps across rooftops²²
  

Durability:

Blunt:

• Laughs off a punch in a bar fight.^Annual2
  
• Shrugs off a punch from an athletic vigilante.¹⁶
  
• Is flung by the scruff of the neck into the wall of a bank vault by a superhuman cyborg^23.
  
• Trades blows with a superhuman military cyborg²³
  
• Thrown into a mirrored wall hard enough to put a large hole in it Here’s a better picture of the hole for scale.³
  
• Gets smashed in the face with a length of metal pipe.²⁷ The man who does this is an especially brutal serial killer who has killed at least three people with his bare hands.^23.
  
• A reanimated corpse slams him into a wall hard enough to knock bricks loose^36.
  
• Falls through a skylight⁴ and onto a pool table hard enough to break it in half.⁵ Says his back is killing him after, but the fact that he got right up and started shooting shows he’s not hurt too bad.
  
• Takes a beating from Dante, his kickboxing instructor, ending with getting cratered into a window.^Annual1
  
• Has his head smashed through a car window.^ONB
  
• Jumps off a stack of shipping crates.^Annual2
  
• Falls from a roof into a dumpster^6.
  
• Falls what he estimates¹¹ to be 100 feet off a bridge.¹²
  
• Leaps off a roof through a skylight down to ground level.²⁵ The one who gets shot and falls first is a ponytailed imposter.
  
• Gets chucked through a window and falls onto a car hard enough to dent its roof and shatter all its windows.²⁵ He’s knocked out, but comes to after a second, able to walk with help despite a broken rib and a concussion.²⁶
  
• [While tied to a giant typewriter key, falls from the top of a tall office building.(https://imgur.com/a/4HgrLtJ)^9
  

Piercing:

• A zombie is unable to bite through the kevlar lining on the arm of his costume.^37.
  
• The suit protects from a thrown knife.^ONB
  
• Takes a bullet to the shoulder. Kevlar blunts the impact.^24.
  
• It’s unclear, but it looks like he takes another one here.^25.
  
• Is shot in the back with a sniper rifle¹¹ and gets right back up. Attributes this to the kevlar lining in his costume^11.
  

Endurance:

• Beaten with a nail board by an imposter Hornet and keeps fighting.²⁵ The imposter is an especially brutal serial killer who has killed at least three people with his bare hands.²³
  
• Takes a bullet that pierces his shoulder. Proves to be still in fighting shape later during the same scene.^10.
  
• Kato hits him in the leg with a hornet dart.. Kato can throw these darts hard enough to pierce through ninja masks and lodge in their skulls.² and shatter gas mask lenses.³¹
  

Heat:

• Gets thrown off his feet by an explosion inside a burning warehouse.^K13
  
• Gets blown up by an explosive while riding the Street Stinger.¹⁶
  
• Takes the blast from a crowd of exploding zombies.³⁷ The reason they exploded when shot was because the chemical that reanimated them reacts violently with his sleep gas.³⁷
  
• Shakes off a tank shell explosion. At the time, he was wearing a cheap copy²⁰ of his costume borrowed from a museum, so no kevlar protection for this feat.
  
• Survives the blast of a bomb that blasts through a concrete wall and sends a whole orchestra flying.^7.
  

Other:

• Has bright lights turned on right in front of him while wearing nightvision goggles^6.
  
• Gets dropped into a sewer line and flushed out to the docks³²
  

Skill:

Martial Arts:

• Won six kickboxing tournaments prior to his Green Hornet training.²
  
• Taught himself Krav Maga behind Kato’s back.^Annual2
  

Combat - Groups:

• Takes down a pair of Kazakh mobsters.^Annual2
  
• Takes down another pair, starting from a seating position.^Annual2
  
• With Mulan, takes out a whole warehouse of gangsters.⁷
  
• With Mulan, takes down at least 7 assassins.^G3 These men are elite killers hired from around the world by the Espada^G3 --basically, the Illuminati.
  
• Almost singlehandedly wipes the floor with an underground fighting ring of at least 8 opponents.²¹
  

Combat - Solo:

• Beats Scowl in a fight.¹⁶ Scowl and his partner were previously able to smash through windows, and effortlessly take down a pair of robbers, wrecking a store in the process.¹⁶
  
• Brawls with Snake a skilled MMA pit fighter who trained in every form of violence imaginable.^ONB
  
• Beats Santa Muerte in a fight.¹⁴ Santa Muerte previously held her own against Mulan.^13.
  
• Early into his training, spars fairly evenly with Mulan.⁶
  
• After some training, spars again with Mulan and manages to pin her.⁷
  
• Even later on, he spars with Mulan while remaining relaxed and casual the whole time.¹³
  

Accuracy:

• Knocks out a ninja with a thrown plate²
  
• Hits a fleeing purse snatcher’s hand with a not!batarang
  
• Headshots a mob boss three times in a row⁵
  
• Tags three gangsters from above while swinging from a chain.^10.
  
• Headshots 5 targets in quick succession.⁶
  
• Rapidly headshots a whole crowd of zombies.^37.
  
• Shoots a gun out of the Black Hornet’s hand.⁸
  
• Shoots a gun out of a priest’s hand.¹⁴
  
• Shoots a human trafficker in the hand before he can pick up his gun.^15.
  
• Throws two hornet darts, disabling a bomb detonator and tagging him in the dick.³⁵
  
• Slices apart Nikki Stripez’s cybernetic ribbons with thrown hornet darts.^35.
  
• Using the Black Beauty’s machine guns, pops the tires on three pursuing cop cars.⁵
  
• Using the Black Beauty’s machine gun turret, lines up shots on a hypersonic experimental aircraft.⁹
  

Misc.:

• Can fly a jet¹⁰
  
• Was the valedictorian of his class and had a 4.0 average²
  
• Correctly ascertains that Juuma is the Black Hornet.^7.
  
• Has done his research about the Mexican underworld¹¹
  
• Identifies snowed over footprints as barefoot^36.
  
• Sets up a sting for a gang.¹¹
  
• Reconstructs a struggle in Mulan's apartment that someone had tried to cover up using forensic clues.^K11
  

Equipment:

Hornet Darts:

• Pierces² through metal ninja masks.⁸
  
• Punctures a metal detonator.³⁵
  
• Slices apart³⁵ Nikki Stripez’s “cyber-bionic filaments.”³⁴
  
• A single jab from one is enough to put a grown man down before he can say another word.^BT1
  
• Three of them contain enough jellyfish toxin to paralyse an elephant.³⁶
  

Dart Gun:
A gun that fires hornet darts.

• Downs a gangster.⁵
  
• Shatters a hole through the forehead of a clown mask.²²
  
• Hit hard enough to shatter the heads of targets.⁶
  
• Has an automatic version that blows chunks out of shooting range targets too.^ONB.
  

Hornet Gas:

• Strong enough to knock people out for two hours at a time¹
  
• Releases an AOE burst that incapacitates a group of gangbangers dogpiling him.¹³
  
• Knocks out Santa Muerte¹⁴ who is much larger than ordinary people.¹²
  
• Knocks out a pair of guards as he races past them.^15.
  
• Sprays a human trafficker from under his sleeve.^Annual2
  
• Knocks out a passenger in his car using a spraygun.^G3
  
• Floods a whole ballroom working with Britt Sr.^MII6
  
• His gas gun is greatly improved over the original, though the formula of the gas itself is more or less the same, meaning feats from Britt Sr.’s use of it should apply.^MII4
  

Grapple Gun:

• Tortures a human trafficker by dangling him out a window.¹⁵
  
• Trips up a fleeing foe like bolas.⁶
  

Misc.:

• Smoke Grenades^30.
  
• An incendiary grenade that leaves behind his logo.^ONB
  
• Carries explosive charges sufficient to blast his way into a federal bank from the sewers^23.
  
• An acid gun built to deal with zombies^41. Makes targets rapidly melt down to a skeleton^41.
  
• A taser The tased zombie only explodes because the chemical that reanimates them reacts violently with electricity.³⁷
  
• A knockoff batarang.⁶
  
• A glider^G4
  
• A skeleton keycard^15.
  
• A listening device^28.
  
• A set of nightvision goggles⁶
  
• The “Hornet Egg”--an EMP weapon powerful enough to disable all of the alarms in the National Bank of China building for more than 20 minutes. At the time, the bank was being used as a front by Espada,^G4 who are effectively the Illuminati, so security was very likely top notch.
  
• His mask is bulletproof, and also contains a recording device and a transponder.^G4
  
• A flying machine that looks suspiciously similar to a Metal Gear Cypher.^ONB
  
• The Hornet Family's collection of vehicles
  

Misc.

• Partied with the Illuminati in college.
  
• Had a picture of his bare ass published on the front page of the Washington Post.
  

Harry heard the racket. Something tumbled in the back of his Suburban, sliding into the back door with a thud. Likely the suitcase, he thought. Maybe the jerry can. It could have also been one of the boxes, stacked in teetering towers at the rear. Most were unlabeled–overspilling with clothes and other junk drawer-destined items that had failed to make it to his new apartment. He would get to them, soon enough. But the signing of the papers was another story. He would take his sweet ass time for that.
The wind howled as it traveled through the cavities of his vehicle, whistling through the undercarriage. Snowflakes danced and swirled together in clouds of white silk across the highway. Harry kept a firm grip on the wheel, noting the abandoned Astro van in the ditch. That was the last thing that he needed.
The rotten weather didn’t dampen his spirits. If anything, it quickened his tempo. Visions of pina coladas and cloudless skies were playing in his foremind. Bronzed women in skimpy bikinis. He could taste the jolt of sugar on his tongue, the scorching sun upon his skin. His heart fluttered with hungry anticipation. The monotony of his everyday life had left him, at least, temporarily. For a moment, these fantasies took his mind off his current condition: the splitting headache that throbbed in his skull and the other groggy symptoms that came with another late night and bottle of whiskey. It seemed like there had been a lot of those nights lately.
The clock on his dashboard was deceiving—the hour tally inaccurate since daylight savings—but he trusted the minutes, and from the screen, he knew it would be touch and go from here to the airport.
Twenty, to be exact. Twenty more minutes and he’d be in paradise.
Harry was mentally preparing for the mad dash to the Delta kiosk. The thoughts brought on a rush of adrenaline that kept him awake at the wheel at this ungodly hour, assisted by the sips of coffee in his traveler mug (mixed with a generous hint of Baileys).
Above the radio, he heard buzzing coming from his cupholder. Allison’s number blinked on the display. As it vibrated, Harry scoffed at the device, shaking his head from side to side in disbelief. It was convenient timing as far as he was concerned. After she had made it abundantly clear that there was nothing more to say, weeks went by in silence. He was forced to dwell in his thoughts, alone, consumed by the multitude of questions he had for her. None more pressing then: why? He had yet to receive a clear answer.
And now she wanted to talk. When that empty seat next to him could have been hers, after hoarding all that time with their daughter, Julia, now it was convenient to chat?
When the ringing finally stopped, he began to hum along to the radio. The flurries continued their rapid descent, the violent gusts of wind nudging the steering wheel from side to side. He kept his mind at ease, as best he could, with deep breathing.
His foot pushed firmly on the pedal. Ten more minutes. A couple of more turns. And he could put this god-forsaken winter behind him and kiss the frozen tundra goodbye.
A belch erupted from his stomach, the sour taste of last night still lingering. This was his attempt at “moving on”. It wasn’t pretty, he had to admit. But progress was often a steady waddle: a set of slow, meandering steps. His father would always say: as long as the course was forward, and never backward, everything would be fine.
And then the bloody ringtone sang again.
He laughed maniacally at first, baffled by her heavy persistence. But by the third call (and voicemail), he realized his teeth were sore from all of the gritting. He could feel it bubbling up inside of him, an insidious cyclone of rage that was forcing an escape.
“For God’s sake, woman! he bellowed. “You will do anything.”
His right eye began to twitch, but he tried his best to remain calm. He wasn’t going to let her win. As he took in another deep breath, he pushed the dark thoughts away and waited for it all to subside. His shaking slowly stopped. He turned the radio up a couple of notches and focused on the road. The fourth call he barely noticed.
Five more minutes. Five more.
For a little while there was calm. A handful of cars began to populate the secluded highway. He sipped the last of his coffee and then rubbed his eyes. There was an exaggerated yawn or two before he heard the sound again.
The second thump was more subtle than the first, but it was the faint noise that followed that made him tense.
Glancing up at the rearview mirror, the man became instantly blinded. High beams from an approaching semi glared back in his direction. The intense radiance broke his gaze. He swerved a bit, the slick conditions sending the back of his vehicle fishtailing. He bit his lip, his knuckles white, as he pulled desperately on the wheel. A flash of the forest. Bright lights. Fighting the swaying motion of his vehicle, he only just managed to steady his trajectory, spinning the wheel to stave off the sliding momentum. A deep honk blared off in the distance as the eighteen-wheeler cruised past. He skidded to the right side of the solid lines and slowly his breathing returned to normal.
Relieved, but still shaken, he took another moment to calm his nerves. Still, his eyes couldn't help but drift toward the back of the SUV.
Had he really heard it? Had he?
The heat was cranked, but he suddenly felt cold.
Fumbling with the keypad, he unlocked his phone. He was shocked to find that most of the calls had come from his apartment's landline.
His breathing now ran shallow, his heartbeat pounding in his chest.
He killed the radio—and listened.
Nothing.
So he decided to make the call. On the first ring, his mother’s frazzled voice sparked through the speaker.
“Bryan!” she yelled. “Why the hell are you not picking up?”
“What is it, Ma? ” he shouted back. There was the muffled rumbling of a jet engine soaring high above; only the flashing lights on the wings were visible. “I’m almost at the gate. Is everything alright?”
And as the question left his lips, before she was able to respond, he felt a dreadful sickness in the pit of his stomach. Call it intuition.
“I can’t find her, Bryan,” her voice trembled.
His eyes shot up again to the rearview mirror. Not much was visible past the cluttered stacks of overflown boxes. He listened intently, praying he’d hear it again.
“Say something, Bryan!” she shrieked. Her angst brought him back to his childhood home where he and his brothers would wreak havoc around the neighborhood, until, inevitably, they would have to answer for their actions. Only this somehow felt much worse. Mom couldn’t swoop in and save him now with some sorry excuse.
“Where is she, Bryan?”
His response came in tears. He felt them trickle, trailing down the stubble of his cheeks and dampening the t-shirt underneath his parka. But nothing escaped his throat, it had constricted in self-defense, aiming to protect himself from the torrent of sickness he felt churning in his stomach.
“Bryan? Say something!”
He imagined her crawling into the opening, snuggling into the neatly folded piles of t-shirts and shorts, pulling a towel over her head for cover. He imagined there were some late-night giggles drowned out by the roar of his snores. Eventually, they would fade into tiny, concealed breaths as she settled into slumber.
This way Daddy wouldn’t leave her. They could soak up the sunshine and beaches, together.
A perfect little surprise.
And in his desperate haste to make his flight, hung over (and likely still drunk), he crammed the suitcase shut and left his house-sitting mother fast asleep.
The clattering of the wheels against the hardwood and pavement, the tunes on the radio, the purr of the engine, would they have been enough to overtake her cries for help?
It was a bizarre narrative to paint in his mind, one he knew would never suffice. His mother would never believe it, let alone Allison. But maybe there was a more logical explanation…maybe she was still hiding in the house.
There was no longer movement. No voices. Just two 747 jetliners swooping down on their descent, and his mother shrieking in his ear. The words were just noise to him at this point, static gibberish that escaped his comprehension.
The billboards for the park-and-ride blinked in a bright orange neon. He saw the glow of brake lights in his periphery, but his gaze was still fixed upon the rearview mirror.
The turn-off for the airport was an afterthought now.
He hung up the phone and kept driving.
aproyal

Harry heard the racket. Something tumbled in the back of his Suburban, sliding into the back door with a thud. Likely the suitcase, he thought. Maybe the jerry can. It could have also been one of the boxes, stacked in teetering towers at the rear. Most were unlabeled–overspilling with clothes and other junk drawer-destined items that had failed to make it to his new apartment. He would get to them, soon enough. But the signing of the papers was another story. He would take his sweet ass time for that.
The wind howled as it traveled through the cavities of his vehicle, whistling through the undercarriage. Snowflakes danced and swirled together in clouds of white silk across the highway. Harry kept a firm grip on the wheel, noting the abandoned Astro van in the ditch. That was the last thing that he needed.
The rotten weather didn’t dampen his spirits. If anything, it quickened his tempo. Visions of pina coladas and cloudless skies were playing in his foremind. Bronzed women in skimpy bikinis. He could taste the jolt of sugar on his tongue, the scorching sun upon his skin. His heart fluttered with hungry anticipation. The monotony of his everyday life had left him, at least, temporarily. For a moment, these fantasies took his mind off his current condition: the splitting headache that throbbed in his skull and the other groggy symptoms that came with another late night and bottle of whiskey. It seemed like there had been a lot of those nights lately.
The clock on his dashboard was deceiving—the hour tally inaccurate since daylight savings—but he trusted the minutes, and from the screen, he knew it would be touch and go from here to the airport.
Twenty, to be exact. Twenty more minutes and he’d be in paradise.
Harry was mentally preparing for the mad dash to the Delta kiosk. The thoughts brought on a rush of adrenaline that kept him awake at the wheel at this ungodly hour, assisted by the sips of coffee in his traveler mug (mixed with a generous hint of Baileys).
Above the radio, he heard buzzing coming from his cupholder. Allison’s number blinked on the display. As it vibrated, Harry scoffed at the device, shaking his head from side to side in disbelief. It was convenient timing as far as he was concerned. After she had made it abundantly clear that there was nothing more to say, weeks went by in silence. He was forced to dwell in his thoughts, alone, consumed by the multitude of questions he had for her. None more pressing then: why? He had yet to receive a clear answer.
And now she wanted to talk. When that empty seat next to him could have been hers, after hoarding all that time with their daughter, Julia, now it was convenient to chat?
When the ringing finally stopped, he began to hum along to the radio. The flurries continued their rapid descent, the violent gusts of wind nudging the steering wheel from side to side. He kept his mind at ease, as best he could, with deep breathing.
His foot pushed firmly on the pedal. Ten more minutes. A couple of more turns. And he could put this god-forsaken winter behind him and kiss the frozen tundra goodbye.
A belch erupted from his stomach, the sour taste of last night still lingering. This was his attempt at “moving on”. It wasn’t pretty, he had to admit. But progress was often a steady waddle: a set of slow, meandering steps. His father would always say: as long as the course was forward, and never backward, everything would be fine.
And then the bloody ringtone sang again.
He laughed maniacally at first, baffled by her heavy persistence. But by the third call (and voicemail), he realized his teeth were sore from all of the gritting. He could feel it bubbling up inside of him, an insidious cyclone of rage that was forcing an escape.
“For God’s sake, woman! he bellowed. “You will do anything.”
His right eye began to twitch, but he tried his best to remain calm. He wasn’t going to let her win. As he took in another deep breath, he pushed the dark thoughts away and waited for it all to subside. His shaking slowly stopped. He turned the radio up a couple of notches and focused on the road. The fourth call he barely noticed.
Five more minutes. Five more.
For a little while there was calm. A handful of cars began to populate the secluded highway. He sipped the last of his coffee and then rubbed his eyes. There was an exaggerated yawn or two before he heard the sound again.
The second thump was more subtle than the first, but it was the faint noise that followed that made him tense.
Glancing up at the rearview mirror, the man became instantly blinded. High beams from an approaching semi glared back in his direction. The intense radiance broke his gaze. He swerved a bit, the slick conditions sending the back of his vehicle fishtailing. He bit his lip, his knuckles white, as he pulled desperately on the wheel. A flash of the forest. Bright lights. Fighting the swaying motion of his vehicle, he only just managed to steady his trajectory, spinning the wheel to stave off the sliding momentum. A deep honk blared off in the distance as the eighteen-wheeler cruised past. He skidded to the right side of the solid lines and slowly his breathing returned to normal.
Relieved, but still shaken, he took another moment to calm his nerves. Still, his eyes couldn't help but drift toward the back of the SUV.
Had he really heard it? Had he?
The heat was cranked, but he suddenly felt cold.
Fumbling with the keypad, he unlocked his phone. He was shocked to find that most of the calls had come from his apartment's landline.
His breathing now ran shallow, his heartbeat pounding in his chest.
He killed the radio—and listened.
Nothing.
So he decided to make the call. On the first ring, his mother’s frazzled voice sparked through the speaker.
“Bryan!” she yelled. “Why the hell are you not picking up?”
“What is it, Ma? ” he shouted back. There was the muffled rumbling of a jet engine soaring high above; only the flashing lights on the wings were visible. “I’m almost at the gate. Is everything alright?”
And as the question left his lips, before she was able to respond, he felt a dreadful sickness in the pit of his stomach. Call it intuition.
“I can’t find her, Bryan,” her voice trembled.
His eyes shot up again to the rearview mirror. Not much was visible past the cluttered stacks of overflown boxes. He listened intently, praying he’d hear it again.
“Say something, Bryan!” she shrieked. Her angst brought him back to his childhood home where he and his brothers would wreak havoc around the neighborhood, until, inevitably, they would have to answer for their actions. Only this somehow felt much worse. Mom couldn’t swoop in and save him now with some sorry excuse.
“Where is she, Bryan?”
His response came in tears. He felt them trickle, trailing down the stubble of his cheeks and dampening the t-shirt underneath his parka. But nothing escaped his throat, it had constricted in self-defense, aiming to protect himself from the torrent of sickness he felt churning in his stomach.
“Bryan? Say something!”
He imagined her crawling into the opening, snuggling into the neatly folded piles of t-shirts and shorts, pulling a towel over her head for cover. He imagined there were some late-night giggles drowned out by the roar of his snores. Eventually, they would fade into tiny, concealed breaths as she settled into slumber.
This way Daddy wouldn’t leave her. They could soak up the sunshine and beaches, together.
A perfect little surprise.
And in his desperate haste to make his flight, hung over (and likely still drunk), he crammed the suitcase shut and left his house-sitting mother fast asleep.
The clattering of the wheels against the hardwood and pavement, the tunes on the radio, the purr of the engine, would they have been enough to overtake her cries for help?
It was a bizarre narrative to paint in his mind, one he knew would never suffice. His mother would never believe it, let alone Allison. But maybe there was a more logical explanation…maybe she was still hiding in the house.
There was no longer movement. No voices. Just two 747 jetliners swooping down on their descent, and his mother shrieking in his ear. The words were just noise to him at this point, static gibberish that escaped his comprehension.
The billboards for the park-and-ride blinked in a bright orange neon. He saw the glow of brake lights in his periphery, but his gaze was still fixed upon the rearview mirror.
The turn-off for the airport was an afterthought now.
He hung up the phone and kept driving.
​
aproyal

FEEL FREE TO MAKE OFFERS
NO TRADES PLEASE
I have a handful of pieces to move along. I can take most payment methods. PayPal F&F, Venmo, CahsApp, Zelle, or Apple Pay. Shipping included unless outside of the US. If you have any questions please ask. YOLO takes precedence. Thanks for looking!
Timestamp
McNees
[A]Mac 2 3.5 shockwave in atomic stonewash, flat grind, magnacut blade. LNIB, out for pics and handling, might have cut tape with it once, factory edge and in excellent condition. I did hit it with a little gunny glide but that’s it. Box, COA, & sticker included. $460 SOLD
Chaves
[A]Redencion street, full Ti, satin M390 blade. LNIB, skiffs installed, skull crusher by Stephen Steward of Gecko Customz installed, plain clip is installed but skull clip is included as well as original bearings and original backspacer. Carried a couple times but kept in the holster and only removed for pics. Has been handled, disassembled, and lubed. I might have cut tape with it a couple times but it’s in excellent condition. $280
Mando PM2
[A-]Spyderco PM2, brass scales with black DLC coated S45VN blade. This is a seconds but I couldn’t find anything wrong with it besides the edge being a little uneven but I put it on my PA pro and evened it up. Dead center and buttery smooth action. Also, beskar engraved brass scales by Meton Boss, Lynch blacksmith feather clip, which is brand new never seen a pocket, and sweet lanyard by Ian Cameron with brass accent beads and a brass Mando bead. This is one of my favorite Spydies. The extras turned it into something unique and it’s a beauty. I do have the original black G10 scales, they’re in good shape, don’t recall there being any scuffs or scratches but there may be. I have carried this a couple times, there is a light scratch on one of the scales by a screw, and I’ve opened a couple packages with it but it’s really been babied. Blade has been oiled as you can see in the video and I hit it with some gunny glide and some gunny slides on the detent. I will include the original clip and some spare screws from Lynch. Comes in a Spyderco box but it’s for a different knife. $175 SOLD
Seigaiha Shaman
[B]Spyderco Shaman, copper scales, stonewashed S30V blade. This is a seconds, came with black G10 scales which I still have and are included, installed are copper seigaiha Meton Boss scales and a copper geared backspacer, also from Meton Boss. Clip is original, the very, very tip of the blade was was ground down by mistake, got it too close to the concrete the one and only time I used it. It could easily be repaired on a decent sharpener, I just haven’t done it. It’s really barely noticeable and doesn’t affect function whatsoever. The scales have started to patina slightly where my thumb sits when handling it. This thing is a chonker weighing in at 10.25oz. The scales are thick copper and the backspacer added more than I thought it would. She’s sexy though. Action is a tiny bit stiff which could be tuned and will get better with time. Gunny glide has been applied as well as Gunny slides on the detent. I carried it once and had no choice at the time but to use it during a hurricane to cut plastic sheeting and it’s only been handled a bit and in a few pics ever since. Comes in a Spyderco box but it’s for another knife. $170 SOLD
Copper PM2
[B]Blade HQ exclusive Spyderco PM2 with black DLC coated REX45 blade. Copper scales with Lynch blacksmith feather clip installed. I am the second owner, it had the light scratches on it when I got it, they’re pretty small and faint except the one on the back. Carried once or twice, cut a couple times light duty, just tape. The semicircular mark on the back by the clip is noticeable. First owner said they didn’t even know how it got there. Looks like the clip was loose and spun around and rubbed it. I honestly think it would buff out with some compound and a polishing wheel. Anyway, I just did a nice polish job on it a couple weeks ago and it’s started to develop a beautiful patina. I’m not big on patina but I like how this is progressing. It hasn’t seen skin oils since before I polished it which contributed to that but when I got these pics I forgot to put on gloves so it may change. I will include the original clip and some spare screws from Lynch as well. Gunny glide has been applied as well as Gunny slides on the detent. Comes in original box. $160 SOLD
Para 3 LW
[B]Spyderco LW Para 3, black FRN, satin CTS BD1N blade. This para 3 has been carried a bit and used a bit but only light duty. Still very clean, no scratches or marks except on the installed Lynch clip but they’re small and light. Included is the attached black and red woven Spyderco lanyard with a thick spydie bead. Blade is a touch off center as with many LW Spydies but the action is smooth as silk. Gunny glide has been applied as well as Gunny slides on the detent. Will come in an unlabeled Spyderco box. $70 SOLD
Honeybee
Spyderco honeybee slip joint in DLC coated 3CR steel, BNIB. It is what it is, a tiny spydie. I bought it and stuck it in a drawer. Cool little keychain knife. Comes in original box. $23 SOLD

FEEL FREE TO MAKE OFFERS
NO TRADES PLEASE
I have a handful of pieces to move along. I’m still under 25 so you know the deal. Shipping included unless outside of the US. If you have any questions please ask. YOLO takes precedence. Thanks for looking!
Timestamp
McNees
Mac 2 3.5 shockwave in atomic stonewash, flat grind, magnacut blade. LNIB, out for pics and handling, might have cut tape with it once, factory edge and in excellent condition. I did hit it with a little gunny glide but that’s it. Box, COA, & sticker included. $460 SOLD
Chaves
Redencion street, full Ti, satin M390 blade. LNIB, skiffs installed, skull crusher by Stephen Steward of Gecko Customz installed, plain clip is installed but skull clip is included as well as original bearings and original backspacer. Carried a couple times but kept in the holster and only removed for pics. Has been handled, disassembled, and lubed. I might have cut tape with it a couple times but it’s in excellent condition. $280 SOLD
Mando PM2
Spyderco PM2, brass scales with black DLC coated S45VN blade. This is a seconds but I couldn’t find anything wrong with it besides the edge being a little uneven but I put it on my PA pro and evened it up. Dead center and buttery smooth action. Also, beskar engraved brass scales by Meton Boss, Lynch blacksmith feather clip, which is brand new never seen a pocket, and sweet lanyard by Ian Cameron with brass accent beads and a brass Mando bead. This is one of my favorite Spydies. The extras turned it into something unique and it’s a beauty. I do have the original black G10 scales, they’re in good shape, don’t recall there being any scuffs or scratches but there may be. I have carried this a couple times, there is a light scratch on one of the scales by a screw, and I’ve opened a couple packages with it but it’s really been babied. Blade has been oiled as you can see in the video and I hit it with some gunny glide and some gunny slides on the detent. I will include the original clip and some spare screws from Lynch. Comes in a Spyderco box but it’s for a different knife. $175 SOLD
Seigaiha Shaman
Spyderco Shaman, copper scales, stonewashed S30V blade. This is a seconds, came with black G10 scales which I still have and are included, installed are copper seigaiha Meton Boss scales and a copper geared backspacer, also from Meton Boss. Clip is original, the very, very tip of the blade was was ground down by mistake, got it too close to the concrete the one and only time I used it. It could easily be repaired on a decent sharpener, I just haven’t done it. It’s really barely noticeable and doesn’t affect function whatsoever. The scales have started to patina slightly where my thumb sits when handling it. This thing is a chonker weighing in at 10.25oz. The scales are thick copper and the backspacer added more than I thought it would. She’s sexy though. Action is a tiny bit stiff which could be tuned and will get better with time. Gunny glide has been applied as well as Gunny slides on the detent. I carried it once and had no choice at the time but to use it during a hurricane to cut plastic sheeting and it’s only been handled a bit and in a few pics ever since. Comes in a Spyderco box but it’s for another knife. $170 SOLD
Copper PM2
Blade HQ exclusive Spyderco PM2 with black DLC coated REX45 blade. Copper scales with Lynch blacksmith feather clip installed. I am the second owner, it had the light scratches on it when I got it, they’re pretty small and faint except the one on the back. Carried once or twice, cut a couple times light duty, just tape. The semicircular mark on the back by the clip is noticeable. First owner said they didn’t even know how it got there. Looks like the clip was loose and spun around and rubbed it. I honestly think it would buff out with some compound and a polishing wheel. Anyway, I just did a nice polish job on it a couple weeks ago and it’s started to develop a beautiful patina. I’m not big on patina but I like how this is progressing. It hasn’t seen skin oils since before I polished it which contributed to that but when I got these pics I forgot to put on gloves so it may change. I will include the original clip and some spare screws from Lynch as well. Gunny glide has been applied as well as Gunny slides on the detent. Comes in original box. $160 SOLD
Para 3 LW
Spyderco LW Para 3, black FRN, satin CTS BD1N blade. This para 3 has been carried a bit and used a bit but only light duty. Still very clean, no scratches or marks except on the installed Lynch clip but they’re small and light. Included is the attached black and red woven Spyderco lanyard with a thick spydie bead. Blade is a touch off center as with many LW Spydies but the action is smooth as silk. Gunny glide has been applied as well as Gunny slides on the detent. Will come in an unlabeled Spyderco box. $70 SOLD
Honeybee
Spyderco honeybee slip joint in DLC coated 3CR steel, BNIB. It is what it is, a tiny spydie. I bought it and stuck it in a drawer. Cool little keychain knife. Comes in original box. $23 SOLD