The Last Log Burns

The fire was dying, and that was the first mistake.

Mark always insisted on keeping a heavy reserve of wood stacked beneath the blue tarp, well away from the drip line of the hemlocks, but tonight the moisture had gotten to it anyway. When he shoved a fresh split of white pine onto the embers, it didn’t crackle with that clean, spitting pop you wanted from a backcountry hearth. Instead, it hissed. A long, wet sign that sounded entirely too much like an exhaled breath in the freezing mountain air.

“It’s just damp,” Mark muttered, rubbing his hands over the weak, sputtering orange glow. The light barely reached past the perimeter of their four camp chairs, dying out against the thick wall of absolute blackness that defined the high country.

Around them, the forest was doing that thing it always did when the wind died down. It went completely, unnervingly still. There were no owls. No rustling mice in the dry leaf litter. Even the distant, rushing white noise of the creek down in the ravine seemed to flatten out, as if the air itself had grown heavy and reluctant to carry sound.

I pulled my flannel jacket tighter around my shoulders and stared into the coals. “Did you hear anything about animal activity around this loop?”

“Park ranger said bears were bagged and hauled out of the lower basin last month,” Mark replied, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced himself. He picked up the long iron poker, turning a charred log over. A shower of tiny, dull Sparks drifted up, spinning into the dark like dying fireflies before winking out completely. “Why? You hear something?”

“No,” I lied.

The truth was, I hadn’t heard anything. That was what was bothering me. For the past twenty minutes, every time the fire dipped low and the shadows at the edge of the clearing lengthened, I had this strange, persistent sensation in the back of my skull. It wasn’t the feeling of being watched - not exactly. It was the feeling that someone was standing right behind my chair, leaning in just close enough to read the thoughts running through my head, but standing so impossibly still that the air pressure hadn’t even shifted.

I told myself it was just the altitude, or the exhaustion from the six miles of brutal switchbacks with a fifty-pound pack biting into my shoulders.

“Let’s turn in soon,” I said, my voice sounding thin and small against the vastness of the dark trees. “We’ve got another big climb tomorrow if we want to hit the ridge line before noon.”

“Yeah. Just let this last log burn down,” Mark agreed. He stared blankly into the pit.

The white pine log was struggling. It has charred a deep, glowing charcoal black along the bottom where it touched the bed of red embers, but the top half remained stubbornly pale, oozing tiny, glassy bubbles of sap that boiled and popped in slow motion.

And that was when the smell started.

It wasn’t wood smoke. It wasn’t the sharp, clean aroma of pine resin or damp earth. It was faint at first, riding on a sudden, icy draft that swept backward out of the dark woods - a sterile, metallic scent, like cold iron left out in the rain, mixed with something distinctly like scorched paper.

Mark sniffed the air, his brow furrowing. “Did you leave a tin foil wrapper out near the stove?”

“No,” I said, my heart giving a strange, heavy thump against my ribs. “Everything’s packed in the bear canister.”

The draft died instantly, replaced by a suffocating stillness. The fire didn’t flicker; the flames flatten out, pulled sideways toward the outer edge of the stone ring as if the darkness itself was inhaling.

At the very edge of the firelight, where the beam of our headlamps cut feeble pathways into the dense thicket of fern and briar, something moved.

It wasn’t a sudden dash or the heavy, clumsy crashing of a deer or bear. It was a slow, agonizingly deliberate shift or weight. A dry oak leaf crunched underfoot - scritch. Then another. Scritch. Whatever was out there was pacing back and forth just beyond the reach of the orange glow, keeping perfect time with the rhythmic hissing of the wet pine log.

Mark froze, the iron poker held half-raised in his hands. His eyes darted to the left, toward the dense cluster of young hemlocks where the shadows pooled the deepest.

“Hello?” Mark called out, his voice dropping an octave into that forced, aggressive cadence men use when they want to sound braver than they feel. “Parks department has this site permitted. You’re off trail.”

No answer. The pacing stopped.

The silence that followed was heavier than before, pressing down on my ears until they popped. I wanted to stand up, to grab my flashlight and sweep the beam across the brush, but my limbs felt leaden, rooted to the folding canvas chair as if the cold form the ground was seeping directly into my bones.

Then, from the dark directly behind Mark’s back - not from the woods twenty feet away, but from the empty space right behind his left shoulder - a voice spoke.

It didn’t sound like a monster or a ghost. It sounded entirely, horribly normal.

It was my own voice, pitched at a quiet, conversational murmur, repeating the exact words I had thought to myself ten minutes ago while looking at the map: We should have stayed at lower camp.

Mark didn’t turn around. He couldn’t. His entire body had gone rigid, the knuckles of his hands gripping the iron poker turning a stark, bloodless white. In the dying light of the fire pit, I watched his pupils dilate as he stared straight ahead into the embers, refusing to look behind him.

The thing behind him didn’t speak again. It just breathed.

It was a slow, dry respiration, accompanied by the faint, sickening sound of sliding paper- like a dry leaf being dragged across rough concrete.

I sat there, paralyzed in the fading warmth, watching the very top of the last pine log turn from glowing orange to a dull, ash-gray black. The light was shrinking. The circle of safety was contracting inward, inch by inch, as the ember began to fade.

And the last red spark flickered out and the clearing plunged into absolute, impenetrable blackness, the breathing moved closer, sliding right in between our chairs.

I stopped breathing. I waited for Mark to speak, to yell, to dosomething.

Then, the cold, freezing pressure of a hand clamped directly over my mouth.

It wasn’t Mark’s hand. It was too wide, the fingers too long and brittle, pressing against my lips with the weight of wet stone.

Before I could even scream, a searing, white-hot flash tore through the blackness—the blinding beam of a heavy-duty flashlight snapping on less than an inch from my face.

The light didn’t reveal the trees. It revealed a face pressed so close to mine I could smell the metallic stench of iron and burnt ash. Skin stretched impossibly tight over a skull that had no eyes, only empty, weeping sockets staring right through me, wearing a grin that split open far too wide.

Mark screamed—a sharp, shattered sound that tore right through the dark—as the thing in front of us jerked backward into the brush with a violent, bone-snapping crack of branches.

We scrambled backward over our folding chairs, kicking wildly into the dirt, but the clearing was empty. There was nothing out there anymore. Just the smell of scorched paper, the freezing mountain wind, and the absolute, terrifying realization that the dark had teeth.