Alex only knew the place by reputation. A narrow ravine cut by a creek where the soil was prone to slides and the trees grew in a tangled mess. He walked with confidence but stayed alert. The forest was changing here. Trails vanished, and the ground was littered with rocks hidden under the moss. Branches snagged his jacket as if trying to hold him back.
At one point, he stopped and looked around. A strange silence filled the air. Not a dead silence, but a waiting one. Half an hour later, he heard the water. The creek was narrow but fast, tumbling over stones, clear and cold, reflecting the first gray light of dawn.
The banks of the ravine were reinforced with old logs, partially buried in the earth. That jumped out at Alex immediately. That doesn’t happen in the wild. Someone had shored up this slope. A long time ago. And more than once.
He climbed down, testing every step. Almost immediately, he saw the first sign. The remains of a wooden platform, mostly rotted away but still holding its shape. The boards weren’t scattered; they were laid flat, like a floor. Nearby were rusted nails—long, old-fashioned ones. They couldn’t have just appeared there.
Alex knelt and touched the ground. The soil was packed hard, denser than the surrounding area. People had walked here. Often. Maybe for years. A little further on, he saw a ring of stones. An old fire pit. The ash was long gone, but the center was still dark. He imagined people sitting here. Not once, not in a hurry. This was a place people returned to.
And then he saw the symbol. A small metal plate was partially embedded in the root of an old spruce. Rust had nearly eaten the surface, but the mark was there. The same one. Alex let out a slow breath. There was no mistake. He was in the right place.
Further down, the ravine opened into a small flat, hidden from view by thick brush. Here, the trees grew strangely—not straight up, but curving inward as if trying to screen the space. On the ground were fragments of rotted crates and scraps of cloth that had almost become part of the earth. Alex realized: this wasn’t a temporary camp or a hunter’s shack.
He remembered the old campfire stories about a hunting lodge that supposedly burned down, about men who went out for a season and never came back, about the vague explanations that never quite added up. It all suddenly had a physical form. The creek bubbled along, indifferent.
Alex walked the perimeter, noting the details. Equipment had been repaired here; things had been stored; people had waited. He saw signs of repeated maintenance—reinforced slopes, replaced logs. This place had been used deliberately for a long time. He stopped at the edge of the drop-off and looked down, and in that moment, he understood the core of it.
The forest didn’t take people; it just hid what others had done. People were brought here and never allowed to leave. Alex felt something final settle inside him. Any lingering doubts were gone.
This wasn’t a ghost story, a coincidence, or a tragic accident. This was the work of men. He sat on a rock by the creek and closed his eyes for a moment. Faces came to mind—not specific ones, but the collective memory of those whose things he’d seen in the box. They had been here, in this ravine. They had looked at these same trees, heard this same water, and then they were gone…
