Tales From the Grave

Rachael yanked her Canucks cap down lower over her ears as the wind cut through her like a blade of ice. It had been a wet day, the kind of relentless, bone-soaking rain that California needed but never got quite right. Now, in the creeping twilight, the trees of Mount Wilson dripped fat, sullen beads of water onto the leaf-littered trail. The scent of damp earth and pine filled her nostrils, sharp and clean, but with an undercurrent of rot.

She took a sip of the pop she’d been nursing for the past hour. Bitter. Flat. Probably warm now. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t drinking it for the taste.

What she wouldn’t give to be at home right now, curled up under a blanket, watching a good old British horror flick—the kind where ghosts wept in corridors and the past never stayed buried. But no. She was here, standing alone on a muddy trail in the Angeles National Forest, waiting.

Waiting for him.

Her boyfriend—though the title felt less secure than it had a few weeks ago—was already hours late. His texts had dried up two hours back, his calls a ghostly silence. Had she been stood up? The thought stuck in her brain like a splinter, an irritating little prick of doubt that wouldn’t go away.

Then, out of the fog-thickened dusk, came the lights. A car.

The hell?

Rachael barely had time to react before the headlights roared up the trail straight at her, a blinding wall of white slicing through the mist. Too fast. Too reckless.

“Fitta!” she spat, her brain digging up the Swedish she’d been trying to learn, just in time for her body to react. She flung herself to the right, tumbling down the steep embankment, branches whipping at her arms, mud swallowing her hands as she caught herself just short of rolling all the way down into the ravine.

Breath heaving, heart hammering, she climbed back up, wiping at the muck streaking her jeans. The taillights flickered like dying embers as the car vanished into the mist, leaving nothing behind but silence and the lingering vibration of wrongness.

She stood there, listening to the whispering trees, to the distant drip-drip-drip of rainwater off the leaves. Her skin crawled. What the hell was that?

She kept walking, her steps crunching on gravel. The cold was getting deeper now, wrapping its fingers around her ribs. She shoved her hands into her hoodie, trying to rub warmth into them, when—

Headlights again. But this time, behind her. She turned, squinting against the glare. The car had come back.

The engine cut out. The lights died, plunging the trail into darkness again. But the night wasn’t silent anymore. A door opened. Then it shut.

Rachael’s stomach clenched. She could hear footsteps, slow and deliberate, the sound of something big moving in the dark. The wind shifted, carrying a smell—thick, rancid, like old meat left to sweat in the sun. Her breath came faster.

She yanked out her phone, pretending to text, using the dim glow of the screen as an excuse not to look. Something looked anyway.

The face that flickered in the phone’s glow wasn’t a face at all—not really. Barbed wire had been wrapped around it like a cage, biting deep into flesh, warping the features beneath so they bulged in sick little pillows of meat. The eyes—Christ, the eyes—were too bright, too hungry.

The thing stepped closer. The smell hit her like a slap. A chain rattled in the dark. Before she could move, before she could even scream, something heavy coiled around her neck—a rusted chain, thick with age and rain and something darker.

The man—if he was a man—didn’t pull. Didn’t choke. Not yet. Then, with one casual kick to her back, he sent her tumbling down the hill.

She hit the dirt hard, hands scrabbling, but the chain jerked tight, snapping her head back, crushing the breath from her throat. Her limbs twitched, fingers scrabbling, body convulsing in dying spasms.

And above her, silhouetted against the misty sky, the barbed-wire man watched.

Not in a hurry.

Never in a hurry.

Just watching.

Waiting.

Letting the life leak out of her like the last drop of beer from a forgotten bottle. Rachael’s mouth worked, desperate for air, for words, for one last scream— but the night had swallowed her whole.