12 Apr The Gray Herders

Part I

We came to the cabin after everything else had fallen apart—not for a vacation, and not because we wanted to live a simpler life. It was the only option left. My aunt had owned the place decades ago, back in the seventies, when she and her partner still believed in living off the land. She died before I was born, and the cabin sat untouched ever since. When my mother began unraveling—first in small, barely noticeable ways, then rapidly and completely—there was nowhere else for us to go.

My father had already left. CPS was circling. The hospital had recommended long-term psychiatric care, and the court had agreed. So I took my little brother and brought us here—past the last postal route, beyond the edge of cell service, to the place where roads narrowed and the world seemed to forget your name.

The cabin had no modern conveniences beyond a rusted generator and a couple of rain barrels hooked up to an old hand-pump. There was no plumbing, no Wi-Fi, and no promise of help if something went wrong. But it had a roof and four walls, and after the last two weeks we’d spent drifting from borrowed couches to cheap motels, that was enough. Tyler called it our “tree fort with a fireplace.” I didn’t correct him. If it gave him comfort to imagine this place as an adventure, I wanted him to have that.

He didn’t bring up Mom, not at first. I believe he understood more than he let on, even if he couldn’t explain it. Instead, he wandered through the trees, collected dead insects, and pointed out every bird he saw. He was ten years old, and he was good at pretending things were fine. I was seventeen, and I knew they weren’t.

Still, we had quiet. And for a time, that felt like enough.

The fence revealed itself one afternoon as we explored the rear edge of the property. It emerged from the brush, partially overtaken by brambles and creeping ferns, and extended in both directions until it vanished behind the trees. It stood six feet tall and was topped with twisted barbed wire, the posts leaning just enough to suggest age. When the wind fell still, the structure seemed to emit a faint hum, almost like a low electric whine embedded in the silence.

There were no signs or markings. Nothing to indicate who had built it, or what it was meant to contain—or keep out.

Tyler asked if it was supposed to stop people from coming in or to stop something from getting out. I told him it was probably part of an old military boundary. We were just north of the abandoned airbase ruins, and the Adirondacks had always been a patchwork of forgotten government land. He liked that explanation. It made the place sound mysterious, maybe even important.

From that day forward, Tyler spent most evenings near the fence. He never got close enough to touch it—I made sure of that—but he would carry a small folding stool into the underbrush and sit just within sight of it, as though waiting for a show to start.

One night, while I was gathering dry wood near the treeline, he called out to me.

“Do you hear it?” he asked.

I glanced up. “The humming?”

“No,” he said. “Them.”

I paused, turning toward him. “Who?”

He pointed across the fence, to where the trees grew densely enough to block most light, even before the sun dipped. The underbrush was thick there, tangled with vines and broken branches, and shadows collected early.

“There are people out there,” he said. “They walk back and forth. Always at the same time.”

I stared into the forest but saw nothing. “You’re imagining things.”

“I’m not,” he replied. “They’re tall. Taller than Dad. They don’t talk. They just walk. And sometimes they stop and look at me.”

What unsettled me wasn’t the content of his words, but the calm, factual tone with which he delivered them. He didn’t sound frightened or even particularly curious—just observant. I told him to stop sitting out there alone, that he was letting his imagination get the better of him. He agreed, but the next day I found him in the same spot, quietly watching.

At first, I dismissed it as an overactive mind. Out here, surrounded by silence and stripped of modern distractions, thoughts had a way of echoing louder than usual. It was easy to imagine figures in the trees or to mistake the wind for footsteps. Even I had experienced it—brief flickers of motion at the edge of vision, fleeting glimpses of pale shapes just beyond certainty.

And then, one evening, I saw them.

It was just after dusk. I had stepped outside to shake out a blanket when something caught my eye near the treeline. The air still held that lingering early-summer chill that tightened the skin. Tyler was inside with a flashlight and one of the weathered Hardy Boys paperbacks we’d found in the attic.

I approached the porch railing, squinting toward the fence.

Three shapes stood motionless beyond it, spaced evenly apart, no more than twenty yards away.

At first, I assumed they were trees or fallen logs illuminated by moonlight. But I had been out earlier and hadn’t seen them then. And the silhouettes didn’t match. Each figure was roughly man-shaped but wrong in proportion—too tall, too thin, with hunched shoulders and elongated necks. Their features were indistinct, as if smeared in the dark. They appeared almost gray, blending seamlessly into the mist that crept along the forest floor.

I froze. My breath stilled, and I remained perfectly still, not blinking.

They faced me.

A sensation spread through me—not quite fear, but the sharp awareness of being watched. I felt exposed, like something small and preyed upon, standing in the open too long.

Then I blinked, and the shapes were gone.

I tried to rationalize it. Perhaps it had been a trick of the light or my mind pulling from Tyler’s descriptions, a half-formed hallucination born of stress and isolation. But the unease that settled into my bones didn’t fade with the excuses.

Sleep eluded me that night.

And when morning came, Tyler was already back at the fence.

Part II

It rained for three days straight. Not the warm, intermittent kind that passed with a summer breeze, but a cold, relentless downpour that soaked into the wood of the walls and softened the firewood until it hissed and sputtered in the stove. The sky never brightened. Fog clung to the ground like spilled smoke, winding through the trees and draping itself over the fence.

We stayed inside for most of that time. I cooked what I could from the boxes we’d brought with us, stretching canned soups and dry goods into something warm. Tyler spent hours at the table drawing, usually with crayons he’d found buried in the back of an old cabinet drawer. Page after page filled with images—trees, birds, the cabin, and sometimes the two of us. But no matter what else he sketched, one thing always appeared: the fence.

On the third day, Angela arrived.

She showed up unannounced, soaked to the bone in a forest service jacket several sizes too large. After knocking twice, she let herself in with a quick, familiar nod, as though this was something we had agreed upon. We had met her only once before, when we’d first come up here. She had offered to check in every couple of weeks, saying she patrolled the old access trails for downed trees, poachers, and anything else that didn’t belong. I hadn’t expected her to follow through.

“I figured you might be running low on kerosene,” she said as she stepped inside, water dripping from her sleeves. “And this storm isn’t letting up anytime soon. Thought I’d drop some off while I was in the area.”

Tyler took to her immediately, as he usually did with anyone new. He bombarded her with questions—about mushrooms he’d found, about whether snapping turtles lived this far north, and about how to tell the age of a tree by its bark. Angela answered what she could, her tone patient and unhurried, and deflected what she couldn’t without making him feel dismissed.

Then he brought up the fence.

Angela’s face changed. It was subtle but undeniable. Her posture remained still, but her eyes lost focus for a beat—just long enough for me to notice.

“You know it goes for miles,” she said, unscrewing the cap from a metal thermos she’d brought with her. “Longer than it has any business going. Supposedly it’s military property. Some of the maps don’t even show it, which tells you what you need to know. No one’s meant to go in, and nothing’s supposed to come out.”

“That’s what I told him,” I added, trying to steer the conversation toward something lighter.

But Tyler had already leaned in.

“I saw them again last night,” he said. “The herders.”

Angela’s hand paused mid-pour. Just for a second. But it was enough.

“What did you say?” she asked. Her voice remained calm, but the ease had drained from it.

“The ones that walk along the fence,” Tyler replied. “They were with the deer. They were pushing them back.”

Angela didn’t answer. She finished pouring her coffee and set the thermos down. Steam curled between her fingers.

Tyler waited for her to say more, but she avoided his eyes.

“You’ve got a vivid imagination,” she said eventually. “Just don’t go past the fence. That land isn’t for us.”

That was all she offered. She didn’t elaborate, even when I tried to press her later, after Tyler had gone out back to check the water barrels. I followed her toward the door, hoping to coax more information from her before she left, but she kept her back to me.

“I’d keep him close,” she said quietly. “There are old things in these woods. Not all of them care who sees.”

Then she was gone. She didn’t wait for the rain to let up or say goodbye. The porch boards creaked once beneath her boots and then went still.

That night, the air felt wrong. Even the usual sounds—the steady drip of gutters, the whisper of wind in the eaves—had dulled, as though something had muffled them.

I had just finished helping Tyler into bed when I heard a sudden rustling from the trees. It was not the delicate shuffle of foxes or raccoons, nor the distant, playful yipping of coyotes. This was louder. Thudding. Crashing. The kind of noise made by large animals in a panic. I moved to the front window and listened closely. The sound built slowly, rising from the forest floor and climbing through the trees.

Something was coming fast—just beyond the fence.

Tyler appeared at my side without a word. His eyes were wide and alert, and it was clear he hadn’t been asleep.

“They’re driving them,” he said softly. “Just like before.”

“What do you mean?”

“They push the deer,” he explained. “Just fast enough so they go back. If they don’t, the herders stop walking.”

The crashing grew louder. We stepped onto the porch together. I grabbed the flashlight from its hook beside the door, but I didn’t turn it on. I wasn’t sure I wanted whatever was out there to know we were watching.

At first, nothing appeared. Trees swayed in the half-light, and rain clung to the fence in long, trembling lines. Then the deer broke through the underbrush.

Six or seven of them burst into view, hooves skidding in the mud, tongues lolling, their coats soaked and matted with leaves. They charged toward the fence, frantic and disoriented. I thought they were going to slam into it.

But at the last moment, they veered.

Each animal turned sharply and bolted back into the woods. One staggered and stumbled before regaining its footing. None of them tried to cross.

Then we saw the figures emerge.

They slipped out from between the trees like smoke, tall and indistinct. Their forms were humanlike in shape but off in ways that unsettled the eye. They moved in slow, steady patterns behind the deer, not chasing them, but guiding them—as though conducting a silent, invisible boundary.

There were four. One on each flank, one directly behind the herd, and one several paces back from the others, trailing behind like an observer.

Even in the dimness, something about their movement felt unnatural. Their limbs were too long, their frames too still. Their motion was not reactive, nor cautious—it was coordinated and unchanging, like a tide that followed no sound or signal.

And then, the figure in the rear stopped.

It didn’t follow the others. It simply halted and turned, or at least shifted in a way that suggested its attention was now on us. I couldn’t make out a face, but I knew it was looking in our direction. I didn’t need to see eyes to feel its awareness.

A static sensation prickled against my skin, as though a storm were about to break overhead. I wanted to step back, to pull Tyler inside and shut the door, to forget the entire encounter—but my feet would not move. I could not explain what the figure was, and I did not understand what it wanted. Yet I knew, with absolute certainty, that it had seen us.

We stood like that for nearly a full minute, staring across the distance. The rain did not ease. The shapes did not advance.

Then, without warning, the rear figure turned. Its entire body twisted—not like a person pivoting on their feet, but as though the shape itself had been unspooled and rewound. It flowed back into motion, soundless and deliberate.

The others followed. Within moments, the herders disappeared into the trees. Fog and foliage swallowed them completely.

We went back inside. Neither Tyler nor I spoke. Whatever he had seen before, whatever name he had given those shapes, I no longer doubted him. And although I wanted to explain the encounter—to rationalize it somehow, to anchor it to something real—no explanation came.

The fence had kept them out. That much seemed true.

But I had begun to wonder if it had been built for that reason at all.

Part III

The news came through the crank radio sometime after noon. It crackled between static and weather updates, sandwiched between a report on soil erosion and a warning about bear activity near the Blue Ridge trailheads. The broadcast was brief and without flourish: a hiker—male, mid-thirties, name withheld—had vanished three days earlier while traveling a solo route through one of the old military corridors southeast of the High Peaks. Search efforts had begun but were expected to be slow due to difficult terrain and the lingering effects of the recent storm.

I stood at the window while the report looped, the voice rising and falling beneath the churn of static. Outside, Tyler sat cross-legged at the far end of the yard. His knees were tucked into his chest, arms looped around them, and his back hunched slightly forward. I couldn’t see his face from where I stood, but the way he held himself made it clear—he wasn’t just staring into the woods. He was watching for something.

Angela arrived later that afternoon. She carried a gallon of water in one hand and a small pack of batteries in the other. Her arrival was quieter than usual, and she didn’t linger long. I mentioned the missing hiker, hoping for a flicker of concern or surprise. She only nodded once and set the supplies on the counter.

“That happens more than they report,” she said.

I asked her what she meant. She didn’t answer immediately, but the look in her eyes had changed. She adjusted the straps on her bag, glancing toward the treeline before speaking again.

“They never find them,” she said. “That’s the part they leave out.”

Then she turned and left. I watched her disappear into the woods without looking back.

That night, something felt off inside the cabin. I found a cabinet door swinging open and several granola bar wrappers scattered across the counter. At first, I assumed it was mice. But when I reached for the box, I realized five bars were missing—and the back door had been left ajar, the handle slick with condensation. That wasn’t something I would have overlooked.

I stepped outside and found that Tyler’s rain boots were gone from the back step.

I grabbed the flashlight and followed a faint trail of crushed grass leading toward the trees. The prints were subtle, but visible in the wet earth. About twenty feet from the fence line, just before the first coil of barbed wire, I found the boots. They stood side by side in the mud, perfectly aligned. In front of them sat two granola bars, placed neatly on a flat stone. A folded napkin had been set beside them, weighted down with a small pebble.

Nothing else around the area had been disturbed. There were no footprints apart from Tyler’s, no animal tracks, and no marks in the grass that would suggest movement beyond this point. Only the low, ever-present hum of the fence, and the shifting of wet leaves overhead.

I gathered the boots, the food, and the napkin, and carried them back to the cabin.

Tyler was sitting in the living room with a book in his lap. He wasn’t reading. His eyes weren’t moving across the page. He didn’t look up when I came in. When I dropped the napkin on the table beside him, he didn’t flinch.

“You don’t feed them,” I said. I tried to keep my voice calm, but it came out strained. “You don’t leave things out there. Do you understand?”

He said nothing.

“I’m serious, Tyler. You don’t go past the stump. You don’t talk to them. You don’t give them anything. You don’t invite them.”

He sat still for several long seconds, and then replied, “They’re not bad.”

“You don’t know that.”

“They’re not,” he insisted, his voice quiet but firm. “They’re just different.”

He looked up at me then. His expression wasn’t fearful or ashamed. It was something else—something like disappointment, as though I had failed to understand something he thought should have been obvious.

That night, he went to bed without protest. I couldn’t sleep. Every sound outside the cabin made my skin crawl.

At sunrise, I went out back to split kindling. The ground was soft beneath my boots, and the mist had returned, curling low across the yard. I had just raised the hatchet when something moved at the far edge of the clearing.

A man stumbled out of the trees. He looked like he had been thrown forward, like someone had pushed him just hard enough to knock him loose from the woods. His shirt hung in tatters, his jeans were soaked and streaked with mud, and the right side of his face was raw with scrapes. At first, I thought he might be a lost hunter or part of the search party. But then I saw his eyes.

They were wide and rimmed in red, barely focusing. He moved like someone who had forgotten how—each step unstable, one leg uselessly dragging behind him. He crossed the space between the trees and the fence without hesitation, slipping past the first post and staggering into the stretch of open yard between our home and the boundary.

I took a step forward, about to call out, but stopped. Something was wrong. It wasn’t just his gait or his expression—it was the forest behind him. The trees had parted, not physically, but in some invisible way that allowed the space behind him to feel open, exposed. I couldn’t see movement, but I could sense presence.

The herders stood in a half-circle at the forest’s edge. They did not gesture or advance, but I knew they were watching him.

The man paused mid-step. He turned, slowly, as though remembering something he wasn’t supposed to. His body twisted toward the fence, and for a moment, I thought he might flee. Instead, he raised one foot—and then he was gone. No sound. No motion. One moment he existed, and the next he did not—like a frame cut from a reel of film.

The herders lingered a moment longer, the mist thickening around them. Then, as one, they shifted backward into the trees, retreating as fluidly and silently as they had come.

When I returned to the porch, Tyler was standing in the doorway. He had seen everything. He said nothing, and I didn’t ask. That day passed in silence. So did the next. He stopped drawing. He stopped asking questions.

At night, I would pause outside his door and hear him whispering. Sometimes I caught fragments—words like turning, walking, or waiting. More often, it was nonsense, muttered phrases that followed no logic, spoken in a tone that felt detached from the boy I knew.

I began locking the doors at night, though I knew it wouldn’t matter. Not if the herders wanted to come closer—and not if Tyler wanted to go.

Something had shifted. It was more than the disappearance of birdsong or the way the woods seemed to listen when we stepped outside. It was as though a boundary had been crossed, some invisible line we hadn’t noticed until we were already on the wrong side of it.

We had seen them.

And now, they had seen us.

Part IV

Angela returned three days later.

The clouds that morning hung low and heavy, thick enough to dull the colors of the trees and cast the entire clearing in a dim, gray hush. I heard her approach before I saw her—the soft rhythm of boots on the porch, followed by a pause just outside the door. She didn’t knock. The door creaked open, and by the time I came down the stairs, she was already inside.

She looked exactly as she had before, wrapped in the same oversized forest service jacket, hair pulled back beneath a wet hood. But something had changed. Her face carried the same tired lines I remembered, but now there was something else beneath the surface—something taut and unspoken in her eyes.

She didn’t ask how Tyler was. She didn’t comment on the weather or the fog. She just stood near the door, wringing her hands once before lifting her gaze to meet mine.

“He’s seen too much,” she said.

I opened my mouth to ask who she meant, but the answer was obvious. I had known it before she spoke. I had seen it in Tyler’s face, in the way he moved through the house like a guest in someone else’s life.

Angela didn’t wait for me to speak. She stepped forward slightly and continued. “They’ve noticed him,” she said. “And once that happens, they don’t forget.”

Her voice wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t cryptic. It was flat—devoid of inflection, as if the words had been rehearsed too many times to carry emotion anymore.

“You’ve seen them too,” she added. It wasn’t a question.

I nodded.

Angela let out a shallow breath and looked down at the floor. She took her time before speaking again, as if choosing her words carefully. “They don’t cross past the trees. Not usually. Not in all the years I’ve been up here. But something’s changed. The rules—whatever they were—aren’t holding the way they used to.”

She paused, then continued.

“Boundaries are being redrawn. And once something crosses, once it steps through, you can’t go after it. You don’t follow. That’s the one thing I’ve learned that still matters.”

I wanted to press her. I wanted to know who she had followed, and what she had seen. I wanted her to say more, to give me something that made sense. But her expression stopped me.

“What happens if you do?” I asked.

Angela looked at me for a long time. Her mouth parted slightly, then closed again. I could see her struggling—wanting to protect me, perhaps, or just not wanting to relive the truth.

When she finally spoke, her voice remained steady. “You don’t come back the same,” she said. “That’s if you come back at all.”

She turned toward the door. The wind caught the edge of her hood and tugged it sideways, revealing the thin streaks of gray in her hair.

“They wait at the edge,” she said. “But they reach farther than you think.”

Then she stepped outside, disappearing into the thick curtain of fog that had gathered near the treeline. I listened as her footsteps faded into silence, and the boards of the porch settled behind her.

I didn’t follow. I didn’t call out. I remained where I was, standing in the center of the living room while the walls around me creaked with the weight of moisture and time.

That night, I realized the animals were gone.

At first, I thought it was my imagination. The change had been gradual—fewer birds during the day, fewer owl calls at night—but now the silence was complete. When I stepped onto the porch after putting Tyler to bed, I noticed how still the forest had become.

There were no crickets. No frogs. No movement in the underbrush. Even the wind had died, leaving the air feeling suspended and unresponsive.

I waited. Ten minutes passed, then twenty. I walked the length of the porch, checked the side yard, and stared at the fence until my vision blurred. Nothing moved. Nothing stirred.

I went back inside and locked the door.

When I woke the next morning, Tyler was gone.

His bed was empty. The blanket had been folded neatly at the foot—something he had never done before. The pillow remained undisturbed, still shaped from where his head had rested during the night. I checked the bathroom, the pantry, and the small loft above the main room, but every space was still and silent.

The back door hung slightly open.

I grabbed my flashlight and pulled on my boots, still damp from the morning before. The yard was covered in dew, and the grass shimmered with beads of silver that clung to my legs as I ran. I followed the trail instinctively, spotting the faint impressions of small feet pressed into the flattened grass, leading away from the cabin and toward the edge of the property.

When I reached the trees, I saw his flashlight first. It lay just beyond the final fence post, tilted sideways in the grass, flickering weakly as its battery sputtered out. The mist had returned, thicker now, curling over the forest floor and spilling through the break in the fence.

I stepped forward and reached through the gap, expecting the usual resistance from rusted wire—but there was none.

The barbed wire had parted cleanly. There were no tools, no signs of force. Just a silent, open space, wide enough for a child to slip through without catching their clothes.

I moved toward the flashlight. As I approached, the beam dimmed and vanished. The last thing it illuminated was a series of small footprints—bare feet, spaced evenly, heading deeper into the woods.

There were no drag marks, torn fabric, or signs of struggle—only Tyler’s footprints, leading away from home.

I called his name once, then again. No voice returned. No movement answered.

I scanned the trees slowly, searching for any sign—any flicker of gray, any unnatural shape among the trunks—but the forest offered nothing. There were no herders or shadows, no presence at all. The woods had gone still.

I stepped back across the fence line and stood there, unsure of what to do. My heart did not pound. My hands did not tremble. What I felt was colder than fear—a deep, quiet resignation. Tyler had crossed a line, and something had let him go, or taken him. Or both.

And now, whatever had once held that line in place had been erased.

They were no longer waiting.

Part V

I didn’t call the ranger station. I didn’t try to find a signal or contact the search teams. There was no point in pretending this was a normal disappearance. Tyler hadn’t gone missing in the way people go missing. He had gone beyond the line—the one Angela had warned me about, the one we hadn’t known existed until it was too late to turn back.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. I packed.

It didn’t take long. I gathered what I thought I might need: a full water bottle, the flashlight with fresh batteries, the heavy coat from the rack, and the old hunting knife I had found months earlier at the back of a drawer and never used. I didn’t know what I expected to encounter. I just knew that if Tyler had crossed, then I had no choice but to follow.

The light that morning felt wrong. It filtered through the trees in soft layers, diffused and muted, as if the sun were rising behind fogged glass. The shadows drifted without direction, and the air carried no scent—no pine, no damp earth, not even the lingering odor of smoke from our stove. The birds, when they appeared, moved strangely. They flitted from branch to branch without purpose or speed, their flight slow and loose, like puppets suspended from strings that had gone slack.

I crossed the fence just after noon.

The barbed wire offered no resistance. It sagged between the posts, open and welcoming, like a curtain drawn aside for a performer’s entrance. I stepped through the gap and left everything familiar behind.

The forest on the other side was not the one I knew. The silence struck me first. What little noise I could hear—the soft crunch of moss beneath my boots, the quiet rhythm of my own breath—sounded distant, as if echoing from a place several feet removed from where I stood.

The light behaved strangely. It shimmered in pools across the forest floor, shifting without any clear source. There was no visible sun, no warmth, and no identifiable direction. Shadows twisted in ways that defied the terrain. Some stretched out sideways and merged into nothing; others shrank inward, tightening unnaturally with each step I took.

I walked carefully, scanning the ground for any signs. A bent fern. A small red thread caught on a thorn. The faint impression of a bare foot in the moss, with toes pointed inward, as if the child who had left it had stood still for a long time.

There was no clear trail—only moments of suggestion. The path revealed itself in fragments, and I found myself moving as much by instinct as by logic. Sometimes I thought I was walking in circles. At other times, it felt like I was passing into new ground with every step.

But each time I began to doubt, something pulled me forward. A steady flicker of light ahead—too constant to be sunlight and too low to be fire. Once, I glimpsed a piece of blue fabric disappearing behind a tree. It matched the jacket Tyler had worn the day before.

I called his name once, only once. The sound did not echo the way it should have. It bounced strangely, breaking apart as if the trees themselves were absorbing the syllables.

I kept moving.

There was no way to measure time in that place. My watch had stopped sometime before I crossed the fence, and the light above never changed. For all I knew, I had walked for an hour or for an entire day.

And then, I saw him.

He stood at the base of a pale-barked tree with one hand resting lightly against the trunk. His other arm hung loosely by his side. His back was to me, and his head tilted slightly upward, as though he were listening to something far away, something I could not hear.

“Tyler.”

He turned slowly.

His face had changed. It looked thinner, paler, as if the color had been slowly drained from his skin. His eyes met mine, and I froze. There was recognition in them, but behind that familiarity was something else—something vast and unreadable.

“You came,” he said.

His voice was soft. Not flat, but without emotion.

“I came to take you home,” I said.

He didn’t respond right away. His gaze drifted past me, and then returned. Finally, he spoke again.

“They want to show you.”

I felt my throat tighten. “Who?”

“You’ll see,” he said. “You have to see before you understand.”

He turned back to the woods and raised his hand. He pointed into the trees.

I followed his gesture.

They had gathered.

The herders stood in a wide ring between the trunks—dozens of them, maybe more. Each figure was tall, gray, and silent, arranged with precision. They had no faces, no identifiable markings, yet I could tell they were not all identical. Some stood straighter than others. Some leaned slightly forward. All of them were still.

I turned back toward Tyler, but he was gone.

Panic surged through me, immediate and cold. My legs locked, and my chest tightened. I spun in a slow circle, searching for him, but saw only trees and the ring of herders. They did not move. They only watched.

Then something shifted behind my eyes, a strange, painless pressure building rapidly. My vision blurred, and my balance faltered. I tried to speak, to call for Tyler, but my mouth would not form the words. My limbs felt distant, as though they belonged to someone else.

The ground tilted, the forest reeled—

And everything went dark.

* * * * * *

I woke in the cabin.

At first, I thought I had dreamed the entire thing. That I had fainted from exhaustion or panic, and that nothing beyond the fence had been real. But my boots were caked with black mud, the flashlight in my hand was cracked at the lens, and the jacket I had worn was damp with dew that did not belong inside a sealed house.

The back door was shut, latched from the inside.

Tyler was gone.

I searched every room in the cabin. I checked the bathroom, the loft, the root cellar, and the attic. His bed was still made. His shoes were still beside the hearth. But he was no longer here.

I stepped outside.

The fence had returned.

It stood tall and taut, barbed wire threaded cleanly across each post. There was no gap now. No sign it had ever parted. No footprints remained in the grass. It was as if the passage had never opened at all.

Angela never came back. I waited three days. Then a week. There were no further news reports, no search parties, no notes slipped under the door.

Life beyond the fence resumed its rhythm. Birds returned to the trees. Insects hummed in the grass. The breeze moved through the clearing with ordinary intent.

But things were not the same.

Sometimes, at dusk, I step out onto the porch and look toward the treeline. I don’t always see them—but sometimes I do. Tall, unmoving figures, gray against the trees, just beyond the reach of the light. And sometimes, among them, I see one that is smaller than the rest. One that stands a little apart. One that does not quite match.

He never speaks. Never steps forward. But I know he sees me. And sometimes, when I try to remember my mother’s face—when I stare at the photograph above the fireplace until my eyes sting—her features fade the moment I look away.

But I remember Tyler’s.

And I know he remembers me.